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His escape from the Embassy was now known. No less certainly, the failure of the trap Nedda's note had baited had been reported.
He had left Becket the day after Nedda's rather startling removal to Joyfields, and since then had done his level best to put the whole Tryst affair, with all its somewhat sinister relevance to her life and his own, out of his mind as something beyond control. He had but imperfectly succeeded.
But down Nedda's cheeks, behind her, rolled two tears. "Cookie, oh, Cookie!" And she ran out.... And the first moment? It was like nothing she had dreamed of. Strange, stiff!
When Spring and first love meet in a girl's heart, then the birds sing. The songs that blackbirds and dusty-coated thrushes flung through Nedda's window when she awoke in Hampstead those May mornings seemed to have been sung by herself all night.
She was looking at it somewhat severely, when she heard Nedda's knock. Drawing a screen temporarily over the imperfection, she said: "Come in!" The dear child looked charming in her white evening dress with one red flower in her hair; and while she kissed her, she noted that the neck of her dress was just a little too open to be quite nice, and at once thought: 'I've got the very thing for that.
He shook her firm little hand with his frail thin one, and stood smiling till the restaurant door cut him off from her view. The streets seemed so gorgeously full of life now that Nedda's head swam. She looked at it all with such absorption that she could not tell one thing from another.
Felix, who secretly shared Nedda's horror of the insensate cruelty of flames, listened, nevertheless, to the jubilation that they had caught the fellow, with profound disturbance.
All but Nedda's share in trying to trap him, and having a party the same night.... He stared morosely at the wall. Then he saw, very simply, that she mightn't have known even of his arrest. She lived a highly sheltered life. Her father could have had her kept completely in ignorance.... He cheered immediately.
Presently he brought out his five-watt projector. There was deepest darkness hereabouts. Trees and shrubbery were merely blacker than their surroundings. But there was reason for suspicion. Neither in the house of Nedda's girl friend, nor in the nearer house between, was there a single lighted window. Hoddan adjusted the wave-guide and pressed the stud of his instrument.
But nothing save one black cat came near, and that ran for its life. He bent round and looked under the blue veil-thing that wrapped Nedda's head. Her face seemed mysteriously lovely, and her eyes, lifted so quickly, mysteriously true. She said: "Derek, I feel like a hill with the sun on it!" "I feel like that yellow cloud with the wind in it." "I feel like an apple-tree coming into blossom."
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