‘There wouldn’t be room for him to fall,’ said Nancy, wild with merriment, as they swayed amid the uproar.  For the first time she understood how perilous such a crowd might be.  A band of roisterers, linked arm in arm, were trying to break up the orderly march of thousands into a chaotic fight.  The point for which Crewe made was unattainable; just in front of him a woman began shrieking hysterically; another fainted, and dropped into her neighbour’s arms.

‘Don’t get frightened!’

‘Not I!  I like it.  It’s good fun.’

’You’re the right sort, you are.  But we must get out of this.  It’s worse than the pit-door on the first night of a pantomime.  I must hold you up; don’t mind.’

His arm encircled her body, and for a moment now and then he carried rather than led her.  They were safe at length, in the right part of Oxford Street, and moving with the stream.

‘I couldn’t find your brother,’ Crewe had leisure to say; ’and I didn’t see Fanny French.  There weren’t many people about just then, either.  They must have gone off before I came.’

‘Yes, they must.  It doesn’t matter.’

‘You have some life in you.’  He gazed at her admiringly.  ’You’re worth half a million of the girls that squeak and wobble when there’s a bit of rough play going on.’

‘I hope so.  Did you set me down as one of that kind?’

Nancy found that her tongue had achieved a liberty suitable to the occasion.  She spoke without forethought, and found pleasure in her boldness.

‘Not I,’ Crewe answered.  ’But I never had a chance before now of telling you what I thought.’

Some one in front of them ignited a Bengal light and threw it into the air; the flame flashed across Nancy’s features, and fell upon the hat of a man near her.

‘How do you mean to get home?’ asked Crewe presently.  Nancy explained that all her party were to meet on the other side of the river.

’Oh, then, there’s plenty of time.  When you’ve had enough of this kind of thing we can strike off into the quiet streets.  If you were a man, which I’m glad you’re not, I should say I was choking for a glass of beer.’

‘Say it, and look for a place where you can quench your thirst.’

’It must be a place, then, where you can come in as well.  You don’t drink beer, of course, but we can get lemonade and that kind of thing.  No wonder we get thirsty; look up there.’

Following the direction of his eyes, Nancy saw above the heads of the multitude a waving dust-canopy, sent up by myriad tramplings on the sun-scorched streets.  Glare of gas illumined it in the foreground; beyond, it dimmed all radiance like a thin fog.

‘We might cut across through Soho,’ he pursued, ’and get among the restaurants.  Take my arm again.  Only a bit of cross-fighting, and we shall be in the crowd going the other way.  Did you do physics at school?  Remember about the resultant of forces?  Now we’re a force tending to the right, and the crowd is a force making for straight on; to find the—­’