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Presently it was time to go. By that time Dings was happily established in a corner, sitting on the floor with her arms filled, and herself, indeed, for the most part hidden by an unaccustomed wealth of toys. She seemed careless of all human relationships as her parents receded.

They were forbidden to upset her by saying good-bye.

At the door Elizabeth glanced back for the last time, and behold! Dings had dropped her new wealth and was standing with a dubious face. Suddenly Elizabeth gasped, and the motherly nurse pushed her forward and closed the door.

“You can come again soon, dear,” she said, with unexpected tenderness in her eyes. For a moment Elizabeth stared at her with a blank face. “You can come again soon,” repeated the nurse. Then with a swift transition Elizabeth was weeping in the nurse’s arms. So it was that Denton’s heart was won also.

And three weeks after our young people were absolutely penniless, and only one way lay open. They must go to the Labour Company. So soon as the rent was a week overdue their few remaining possessions were seized, and with scant courtesy they were shown the way out of the hotel. Elizabeth walked along the passage towards the staircase that ascended to the motionless middle way, too dulled by misery to think. Denton stopped behind to finish a stinging and unsatisfactory argument with the hotel porter, and then came hurrying after her, flushed and hot. He slackened his pace as he overtook her, and together they ascended to the middle way in silence. There they found two seats vacant and sat down.

“We need not go there–yet?” said Elizabeth.

“No–not till we are hungry,” said Denton.

They said no more.

Elizabeth’s eyes sought a resting-place and found none. To the right roared the eastward ways, to the left the ways in the opposite direction, swarming with people. Backwards and forwards along a cable overhead rushed a string of gesticulating men, dressed like clowns, each marked on back and chest with one gigantic letter, so that altogether they spelt out:

“PURKINJE’S DIGESTIVE PILLS.”

An anaemic little woman in horrible coarse blue canvas pointed a little girl to one of this string of hurrying advertisements.

“Look!” said the anaemic woman: “there’s yer father.”

“Which?” said the little girl.

“‘Im wiv his nose coloured red,” said the anaemic woman.

The little girl began to cry, and Elizabeth could have cried too.

“Ain’t ‘e kickin’ ‘is legs!–just!” said the anaemic woman in blue, trying to make things bright again. “Looky–now!”

On the facade to the right a huge intensely bright disc of weird colour span incessantly, and letters of fire that came and went spelt out–

“DOES THIS MAKE YOU GIDDY?”

Then a pause, followed by

“TAKE A PURKINJE’S DIGESTIVE PILL.”

A vast and desolating braying began. “If you love Swagger Literature, put your telephone on to Bruggles, the Greatest Author of all Time. The Greatest Thinker of all Time. Teaches you Morals up to your Scalp! The very image of Socrates, except the back of his head, which is like Shakspeare. He has six toes, dresses in red, and never cleans his teeth. Hear HIM!”

Denton’s voice became audible in a gap in the uproar. “I never ought to have married you,” he was saying. “I have wasted your money, ruined you, brought you to misery. I am a scoundrel…. Oh, this accursed world!”

She tried to speak, and for some moments could not. She grasped his hand. “No,” she said at last.

A half-formed desire suddenly became determination. She stood up. “Will you come?”

He rose also. “We need not go there yet.”

“Not that. But I want you to come to the flying stages–where we met. You know? The little seat.”

He hesitated. “Can you?” he said, doubtfully.

“Must,” she answered.

He hesitated still for a moment, then moved to obey her will.

And so it was they spent their last half-day of freedom out under the open air in the little seat under the flying stages where they had been wont to meet five short years ago. There she told him, what she could not tell him in the tumultuous public ways, that she did not repent even now of their marriage–that whatever discomfort and misery life still had for them, she was content with the things that had been. The weather was kind to them, the seat was sunlit and warm, and overhead the shining aeroplanes went and came.