Free Time and Time Again by James Hilton Page A

attracted absolutely no attention, and that people to whom his father had talked had merely disregarded him as a crank. Full relief came later still, when The Times proved its unawareness by printing Havelock's next letter, which was innocuously concerned with the migratory behaviour of the green sandpiper.
    But for the time, during that first week of the Easter vacation, it was only behind a curtain of exasperation that Charles could savour his own private happiness--the thought of the Wednesday ahead, the Wednesday he had chosen as just a random day for meeting Lily again, but which already he wished had been Monday or Tuesday.

    * * * * *

    As soon as he saw her pushing through the swing-doors of the Kingsway office he knew she had dressed up, and though she would have looked just as well to him in what she had worn at their first meeting, he was touched. Naturally, as a man, but still more as a man of his class, he had not thought to do anything similar. There were certain things one wore in the country and slightly different fashions at Oxford or Cambridge, and a third set of rules for London--none of them more difficult than the task of choosing a good tailor and paying his bills. Charles had indeed been in a state of high excitement as he dressed at Beeching that morning, but so far as clothes were concerned, he was just going up to town for the day, and anyone who saw him waiting on the platform at Stow Magna would have known exactly that.
    They shook hands and for a moment were both of them nervous and almost speechless till he raised his arm to halt a passing taxi. 'We'll decide where we'll go while we're going,' he said gaily. And then to the driver: 'Trafalgar Square, to begin with.'
    But he found she had very few ideas about lunch. It seemed that on certain gala occasions she had been to the Strand Palace and the Regent Palace, which she had thought very splendid; but they were not his style, and since he could not afford Claridge's or the Ritz, he wondered if she would be disappointed with the kind of restaurant that suited both his tastes and his pocket pretty well. There was one he and Brunon had discovered, called Le Beau Soleil, in Soho--a small foreign place with no marble and gilt about it, just a few tables in a plain room, rather grubby menus, and a good cuisine for the price. So he said, taking her arm in the taxi: 'Let's go somewhere I once went to--nothing much, but at least it's quiet and we can talk.' It wasn't even quiet; what he meant was that there was no six-piece orchestra booming out popular tunes to drown conversation or to fill the gap of silence between people who had nothing to say.
    It troubled him to think that Le Beau Soleil might disappoint her; but soon he realized how willing she was, at all times beginning with that first one, to go where he took her and to be actively, not merely passively, happy about it. There was a sense, indeed, in which everything that ever happened to her was a gala occasion, needing no particular background to make her enjoy it to the full.
    They had the plat du jour and she refused wine but drank several cups of coffee. The room was downstairs from the street level, in a sort of semi-basement whose windows looked up beyond a railed area to the pavement. One saw the legs of people passing continuously, but no more of them than that without craning one's neck. Sometimes a pair of legs would stop--perhaps to rest, or during the lighting of a cigarette, or for no special reason at all-- and then proceed again. Sometimes a pair of legs would stop close to another pair of legs--a meeting. It was amusing to guess, and then to lean sideways to verify. Once a man stooped and stared, presumably to see if the restaurant was full; it was the only outside face they saw, and behind the railings it looked like that of some strange crouching animal in a cage. 'But HE sees US through the bars,' she said. 'Maybe to him it looks as if WE'RE in the cage.'
    'I've often had the