In the strangeness of it all he had forgotten Winny.

"Then she told you wrong. Now I think of it, Winny doesn't know my real name. My real name would take your breath away."

"Tell it me."

"Well--if you will have it--stand well back and hold your hat on. Don't let it catch you full in the face. John--Randall--Fulleymore--Ransome.

Now you know me."

She smiled enchantingly. "Not quite. But I know something about you Winny doesn't know. That's strange, isn't it?"

It was, if you came to think of it.

They had crossed the Euston Road now, and Miss Usher turned presently up another side street going north. She stopped at a door in a long row of dingy houses.

"This is me," she said, "I've got a room here. It was awfully good of you to bring me."

"Not at all," he murmured.

"And you're sure you didn't mind my speaking to you like that? I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been Winny's friend."

"Of course not."

She was not sure whether he were answering her question or a.s.senting to her statement.

"And now," she said, "you're going home?"

"I suppose so." But he remained rooted to the doorstep, digging into a crevice in it with his stick.

From the upper step she watched him intently.

"And we sha'n't see each other again."

_He_ was not sure whether it was a statement or a question.

"Sha'n't we?" He said it submissively, as if she really knew.

She was opening the door now and letting herself in. Miss Usher had a latch key.

"Where?" said Miss Usher, softly, but with incision. She had turned now and was standing on her threshold.

"Oh--anywhere--"

"Anywhere's nowhere." Miss Usher was smiling at him, but as she smiled she stepped back and shut the door in his excited face.

He turned away, more stupefied than ever.

For the first time in his life he had encountered mystery. And he had no name for it.

But he had made a note of her street, and of the number of her door.

CHAPTER VIII

That night Ransome was more than ever the prey of thought, if you could call it thought, that mad racing and careering of his brain which followed his encounter with Miss Usher. The stupefaction which had been her first effect had given way to a peculiar excitement and activity of mind. When he said to himself that Miss Usher had behaved queerly, he meant that she had acted with a fine defiance of convention. And she had carried it off. She had compelled him to accept her with her mystery as a thing long known. She had pushed the barriers aside, and in a moment she had established intimacy.

For only intimacy could have excused her interference with his innermost affairs. She had given him an amount of warning and advice that he would not have tolerated from his own mother. And she had used some charm that made it impossible for him to resent it. What could well be queerer than that he should be told by a girl he did not know that his case was hopeless, that he must give up running after Winny Dymond, that he was only persecuting a girl who didn't care for him. Ransome had no doubt that she had spoken out of some secret and mystic knowledge of her friend.

He supposed that women understood each other.

And after all what had she done that was so extraordinary? She had only put into words--sensible words--his own misgivings, his own profound distrust of the event.

What _was_ extraordinary, if he could have a.n.a.lyzed it, was the calmness that mingled with his disturbance. Calmness with regard to Winny and to the issue taken out of his hands and decided for him; calmness, and yet a pain, a distinct pain that he was not subtle enough to recognize as remorse for a disloyalty. And, under it all, that nameless, inexplicable excitement, as if for the first time in the affairs of s.e.x, he had a sense of mystery and of adventure.

He did not ask himself how it was that Winny had not stirred that sense in him. He did not refer it definitely to Violet Usher. It had moved in the air about her; but it remained when she was gone.

So far was he from referring it to Miss Usher that when it died down he made no attempt to revive it by following the adventure. He was restrained by some obscure instinct of self-preservation, also by the absurd persistence with which in thought he returned again and again to Winny Dymond. That recurrent tenderness for Winny, a girl who had no sort of tenderness for him, was a thing he did not mean to encourage more than he could help. Still, it kept him from running after any other girl. He was not in love with Violet Usher, and so, gradually, her magic lost its hold upon his memory.

Autumn came, and with it another Grand Display at the Polytechnic Gymnasium, the grandest he had yet known. As if it had been some great civic function, it was attended by the Mayor of Marylebone in his robes.

To be sure, the Mayor, who was "going on" that night, left some time before the performance of Mr. J. R. F. Ransome on the Horizontal Bar.

But Ranny was not aware of the disappearance of the Mayor. He was not perfectly aware of his own amazing evolutions on the horizontal bar. He was not perfectly aware of anything but the face and eyes of Violet Usher fixed on him from the side gallery above. The gallery was crowded with other faces and with other eyes, all fixed on him; but he was not aware of them. The gallery was for him a solitude pervaded by the presence of Violet Usher.

She was seated in the front row directly opposite him; her arms were laid along the bal.u.s.trade, and she leaned out over them, bending her dark brows toward him, immovable and intent. He did not know whether she was alone there. To all appearance she was alone, for her face remained fixed above her arms, and it was as if her eyes never once looked away from him.

And under their gaze an exultation seized him and a fierce desire, not only to exceed and to excel all other performers on the horizontal bar, but to go beyond himself; beyond his ordinary punctual precision; beyond the mere easy swing and temperate rhythm. Instead of the old good-natured rivalry, it was as if he struggled and did battle in some supreme and terrible fight. Each movement that he made fired his blood; from the first flinging of his lithe body upward, and the sliding of its taut muscles on the bar, to the frenzy of his revolving, triumphal, glorious to behold. Each muscle and each nerve had its own peculiar ecstasy.

And when he dropped from the high bar to the floor he stood tingling and trembling and breathless from the queer violence with which his heart threw itself about. So utterly had he gone beyond himself. And he knew that his demonstration had not been quite so triumphal, so glorious as he had thought it. There had been far too much hurry and excitement about it. And Booty told him he was all right, but perhaps not quite up to his usual form.

It was with the air of a conqueror that Ranny pushed his way through the packed line of spectators in the gallery. It was with a crushed and nervous air, as of some great artist, conscious of his aim and of his failure, that he presented himself to Violet Usher, sliding slantwise into the place she made for him.

It was as if she had known that he would come to her. They shook hands awkwardly. And with the stirring of her body there came from her that faint warm odor of violets.

"I didn't expect to see you here," he said, at last.

"Winny brought me; else I shouldn't have come."

She was very precise in making Winny responsible for her appearance. He gathered that that was her idea of propriety.

"Well--anyhow--it's a bit of all right," he said. Then they sat silent for a while.

And the girl's face turned to Ranny with a flying look; and it was as if she had touched him with her eyes, lightly and shyly, and was gone. Then her eyes began slowly to look him up and down, up and down, from his bare neck and arms, white against the thin crimson binding of his "zephyr," from his shoulders and from his chest where the lines and bosses of the muscles showed under the light gauze, and from his crimson belt, down the firm long slopes to his knees; and it was as if her eyes brushed him, palpably, with soft feather strokes. They rested on his face; and it was as if they held him between two ardent hands. And over her own face as she looked at him there went a little wave of change.