To end the silence, so that she might say something to which he could listen, he said, “I was converted long before to-night, you know.  My mother’s keen on the movement.”

“Is she?” She searched her memory.  “Yet I don’t know the name.  Does she speak, or organise?”

“Oh, she doesn’t do anything in public.  She lives very quietly in a little Essex village,” he answered, speaking with an involuntary gravity, an effect of referring to pain, that made her wonder if his mother was an invalid.  She hoped it was not so, for if Mrs. Yaverland was anything like her son it was terrible to think of her lying in the stagnant air of ill-health among feeding-cups and medicine bottles and weaktasting foods.  The lot of the sick and the old, whom she conceived as exceptional people specially scourged, drew tears from her in the darkness, and she looked across the road at the tall wards which the infirmary thrust out like piers from its main corridor.  “Ah, the poor souls in there!” she breathed, looking up at the rows of windows which disclosed the dreadful pale wavering light that lives in sick-rooms.  “It makes you feel guilty, being happy when those poor souls are lying there in pain.”  Yaverland did not seek to find out why she had said it, any more than he asked himself how this night’s knowledge of her was to be continued, or what she meant the end of it to be, though he was aware that those questions existed.  He simply noted that she was being happy.  Yes, they were curiously happy for two people who hardly knew each other, going home in the rain.

They were passing down the Meadow Walk now, between trees that were like shapes drawn on blotting-paper and lamps that had the smallest scope.  “Edinburgh’s a fine place,” he said.  “It can handle even an asphalt track with dignity.”

“Oh, a fine place,” she answered pettishly, “if you could get away from it.”  He felt faintly hostile to her adventurousness.  Why should a woman want to go wandering about the world?

From a dream of foreign countries she asked suddenly, “How long were you a sailor?”

“Three years.  From the time I was seventeen till I was twenty.”

Then it struck him:  “How did you know I’d been a sailor?”

“I just knew,” she said, with something of a sibylline air.  Evidently he was thinking how clever it was of her to have guessed it, and indeed she thought it was a remarkable example of her instinctive understanding of men.  And Yaverland, on his side, was letting his mind travel down a channel of feeling which he knew to be silly and sentimental, like a man who drinks yet another glass of wine though he knows it will make his head swim, and was wondering if this clairvoyance meant that there was a mystic tie between them.  But it soon flashed over Ellen’s mind that the reason why she thought that he had been a sailor was that he had looked like one when he came into the hall in his raindashed oilskins.  She