Already she had impressed him with the quality which, for want of a better word, he thought of as "wildness." It was a quality which he had found strangely, if secretly, alluring, and he acknowledged now that this note of "wildness," of unexpectedness, of "something different" in her personality, had held his gaze chained to the airy flutter of her scarlet skirt.

He felt vaguely troubled.

Something as intricate and bewildering as impulse was winding through the smoothly beaten road of his habit of thought.

The noises of the city came to him as if they floated over an immeasurable distance of empty space.

Through the spectral boughs of the sycamores the golden sky had faded to the colour of ashes.