If Ida felt any relief when, at the end of four miserably long days, Jimmy returned to town, she did not say so, even to her husband. It had been a trial in many ways, but, at the same time, she was conscious of having done her duty. She had impressed her brother with a sense of what he owed to the family in the matter of conduct, and his very depression seemed to show that he had taken the matter to heart.

"Jimmy's nerves are all wrong. He's like a man on wires. He wants a comfortable home and a wife to look after him," Fenton ventured to remark whilst his brother-in-law was upstairs, packing; but Ida brushed the theory aside scornfully.

"I am surprised at you, Joseph. It is not at all the way to speak of marriage. The Griersons have always waited until they were in a position to marry, and have never held those disgusting ideas of nerves and so on. Jimmy most emphatically cannot think of marrying for many years to come. He is perfectly well, or he would be if he did not smoke and drink so much. He has the remedy in his own hands."

Fenton shrugged his shoulders and turned away, wondering inwardly whether the Grierson strain would predominate in his own children. He almost wished Jimmy had not come down. It was annoying to be disturbed and made to think after having got out of the habit of so doing.

The men and women of the type Ida usually invited to the house never worried him in that way, belonging as they did to the class which can afford to take its theories as facts.

Jimmy had heard once from Lalage, a brief little note, just acknowledging his letters, and telling him nothing. Mrs. Fenton had watched carefully whilst he was reading it—she had detected a woman's handwriting—but he had managed to keep his composure, and then, the better to deceive her, he had rolled the paper into a ball and tossed it on to the fire, though it cut him to the heart to part with anything which had once been Lalage's.

He had hoped the girl would have been waiting for him at the station; but he failed to see her tall figure on the platform, so, jumping into a cab, he told the driver to take him to the mansions. However, as they went up the last street, he caught sight of Lalage coming out of a hairdresser's shop. A moment later he was beside her.

Jimmy's first impression was one of delight at the look of genuine pleasure which, had come into her eyes; then he noted with concern how worn and pale she looked.

"I didn't expect you quite so soon," she said. "I must have made a mistake in the time, and I wanted to get my hair done nicely before you got back."

"What has been the matter with you? Why didn't you write, dear?" he asked.

She parried the questions until they got inside the flat, when he repeated them, holding her hands, and looking into her eyes. She tried to avoid his scrutiny.

"I've been all right," she answered, "only there was nothing to write about."

But he would not be put off like that, and at last, with a sob, she told him. "It's over now, and I didn't mean you to know. I—I've had the brokers in." She was speaking hurriedly, in a low voice. "You see, someone has been paying my rent, and I expected it the day you went away—it should have come that morning—and it was due next day. I never heard, and I only had a few shillings, so they put the brokers in at once. These landlords always do."

Jimmy cursed silently. "Why didn't you wire to me? You know I would have sent it at once."

She shook her head. "No, no. I hate taking money from you, above everyone."

"What did you do in the end?"

She looked up and faced him, with a kind of desperate courage. "I got it by going away for two days. It's no good disguising things, trying to make out that I don't."

It was a question which was the paler, the man or the woman. It had come home to him, as it had never done before. He dropped her hands and went over to the window, where he stood very still, staring out with absolutely unseeing eyes; whilst she watched him with a deadly pain at her heart, thinking she had killed the love which she knew had grown up in him.

"Perhaps it's best, after all, perhaps it's best." She tried desperately hard to say the words to herself, then, almost unconsciously, she took a step towards him. Possibly her action altered the whole course of two lives, for, like a flash, he turned round, seized her in his arms, and covered her face with kisses.

"I don't care, now I've come back, because it'll never happen again, it can't happen again, and what went before has nothing to do with me. We'll start afresh, dearest, we'll start afresh." He repeated the words several times, savagely, as though wishing to assure himself that it would be so.

Lalage was crying on his shoulder, sobbing quietly without noise or movement, as overwrought women do; but it was soon over, and she pulled herself together bravely.

"I think you're very tired and we had better have some tea now," she said, smiling at him with wet eyes. He kissed away her tears, then released her, and sat down whilst she hurried into the kitchen to prepare the tray.

It was very much later, in fact not until after they had finished the supper, which she insisted should come from the next street—"Because it was so nice last time," she explained—that he went back to the subject of their future. He was so desperately in earnest that he succeeded in blinding himself to the financial difficulties ahead; and, though perhaps he did not convince either Lalage or himself, they were both in the mood to risk things.

"I'll give up my rooms at Mrs. Benn's, thankfully, and we can take some others, somewhere near Fleet Street, until we can get on our feet," he went on.

But Lalage demurred. "I can't give up this flat, at least not without losing all I've paid on the furniture, until the end of my agreement, in six months' time. Why shouldn't we stay on here?"

Jimmy frowned. He loathed the place and all its associations, but he was not in a position to give her another home of her own, as yet, and he could not answer her argument, especially when she added:

"I can tell them at the agent's office that we are married, and we can give them some name or other."

She said it simply, without the least intention of hurting him; but the words cut him like a whip, for though, for one mad moment, he had thought of marriage, real marriage, he had put the idea on one side as utterly impossible. He was a Grierson, owing a duty to the family, and he could not do the thing. Only he had the grace not even to hint of it to her, and she gave no sign that she had the least expectation of any promise from him. She had recovered her spirits, and, apparently, was quite content with the arrangement he proposed. He was fully conscious that Society would condemn him unsparingly, if it found out, and he could not justify his own conduct, even to himself; but Lalage never seemed to consider the moral aspect of the question, that curious element of irresponsibility, almost childishness, which he had marked at the very outset, was now more noticeable than ever.

Suddenly, a new fear gripped him. "It will never do to give my people this address," he said. "They would make inquiries at once, and then——" He gave a grim little smile.

Lalage's face grew hard. "Why should they hunt you like that? If they really cared, they would have looked after you, instead of sending you to those lodgings. They want you to be like a little boy, to do just what they say, and never to have a mind of your own—oh, yes, but they do. They ought to have seen that after all you've been through, you need care and love."

He looked up with a queer light in his eyes. "Do you love me, Lalage? You've never said so."

"I like you very, very much," she answered.

But he was not satisfied. "Do you love me?" he repeated.

"I like you better, much better, than anyone else I ever met," and with that he had to be content.