Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories of the days when the world was Latin from York to the Tigris, and the Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath to Baalbek.  And they considered a little doubtfully the seventeenth century statue of Bladud, who is said to have been healed by the Bath waters and to have founded the city in the days when Stonehenge still flourished, eight hundred years before the Romans came.

In the afternoon Miss Seyffert came with Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont and was very enthusiastic about everything, but in the evening after dinner it was clear that her role was to remain in the hotel.  Sir Richmond and Miss Grammont went out into the moonlit gloaming; they crossed the bridge again and followed the road beside the river towards the old Abbey Church, that Lantern of the West.  Away in some sunken gardens ahead of them a band was playing, and a cluster of little lights about the bandstand showed a crowd of people down below dancing on the grass.  These little lights, these bobbing black heads and the lilting music, this little inflamed Centre of throbbing sounds and ruddy illumination, made the dome of the moonlit world about it seem very vast and cool and silent.  Our visitors began to realize that Bath could be very beautiful.  They went to the parapet above the river and stood there, leaning over it elbow to elbow and smoking cigarettes.  Miss Grammont was moved to declare the Pulteney Bridge, with its noble arch, its effect of height over the swirling river, and the cluster of houses above, more beautiful than the Ponte Vecchio at Florence.  Down below was a man in waders with a fishing-rod going to and fro along the foaming weir, and a couple of boys paddled a boat against the rush of the water lower down the stream.

“Dear England!” said Miss Grammont, surveying this gracious spectacle.  “How full it is of homely and lovely and kindly things!”

“It is the home we come from.”

“You belong to it still.”

“No more than you do.  I belong to a big overworking modern place called London which stretches its tentacles all over the world.  I am as much a home-coming tourist as you are.  Most of this western country I am seeing for the first time.”

She said nothing for a space.  “I’ve not a word to say to-night,” she said.  “I’m just full of a sort of animal satisfaction in being close to you....  And in being with you among lovely things....  Somewhere—­Before we part to-night—....”

“Yes?” he said to her pause, and his face came very near to hers.

“I want you to kiss me.”

“Yes,” he said awkwardly, glancing over his shoulder, acutely aware of the promenaders passing close to them.

“It’s a promise?”

“Yes.”

Very timidly and guiltily his hand sought hers beside it and gripped it and pressed it.  “My dear!” he whispered, tritest and most unavoidable of expressions.  It was not very like Man and Woman loving upon their Planet; it was much more like the shy endearments of the shop boys and work girls who made the darkling populous about them with their silent interchanges.