ANGEL PAVEMENT

that everything seemed a little larger and noisier than
usual. Once, just before rfie coffee, she had found her-
self wanting to giggle at the thought of Norman taking
his sandy moustache back to Chestervern and old
Warwick. The coffee, black and bitter, stopped all that
nonsense. They smoked a cigarette together over it, and
Norman, with tiny beads of perspiration on his ruddy
forehead and his glasses slightly misty, talked about
old times and smiled sentimentally across the cruet at
her.

It was time to be gone. The Latin suddenly decided
to notice their existence again, brought the bill, accepted
money, proffered change, swept away the tip, and then
apparently threw them both into the street, where the
air seemed at once remarkably pure and unusually cold.
They arrived at the Colladiurn just at the right moment,
a few minutes after the doors had been opened for the
second house. The place was, as usual, besieged by a
mob of pleasure-seekers, who all looked like demons in
the red glare of the lights at the entrance. Norman led
the way, a little uncertainly, and they went swarming
down thick-carpeted corridors.

"Didn't that man say 'Round to the left and up the
stairs'?" Miss Matfield asked. She had a slight head-
ache now. Those peculiar red lights outside the Colla-
dium look exactly like a headache, and perhaps they had
inspired the "burgundy. "I'm sure he did, you know."

"I didn't hear him/' replied Norman, not too amiably.
He was somewhat fussed. "Talking to somebody else,
p'raps."

Feeling a little dubious, she followed him down the
gangway on the ground floor to the auditorium, which
looked as if it were recovering from a fire, there was so