It had been as though there were no future.

To live perfectly through the few hours--even for the one hour or half hour they could snatch--was all that they could plan and hope for.

Could they meet to-morrow in this place or that?
When they met were they quite safe and blissfully alone?
The spectre had always been waiting and they had always been trying to forget it.

Each meeting had seemed so brief and crowded and breathlessly sweet.
Only a boy and a girl could have so lost sight of all but their hour and perhaps also only this boy and girl, because their hour had struck at a time when all futures seemed to hold only chances that at any moment might come to an end.
"Do you hear my heart beat?
There is no time--no time!" these two things had been the beginning, the middle and the end.
Sometimes Robin went and sat in the Gardens and one day in coming out she met her mother whom she had not seen for months.

Feather had been exultingly gay and fashionably patriotic and she was walking round the corner to a meeting to be held at her club.