"Mr. Frederick Devonshire, I positively refuse to minister any longer to such gross egotism! You've been cabinetted, vignetted, and carte de visited. You've been taken in a snowstorm; you've been taken looking out of window, drinking afternoon tea, and doing I don't know what else. If your vanity still remains unsatisfied, you must get another firm to gorge it for you."

"You're a nice woman of business, you are! Turning money away from the doors like this," chuckled Fred. Lucy's simple badinage appealed to him as the raciest witticisms would probably have failed to do; it seemed to him almost on a par with the brilliant verbal coruscations of his cherished Sporting Times.

"Our business," answered Lucy demurely, "is conducted on the strictest principles. We always let a gentleman know when he has had as much as is good for him."

"Oh, I say!" Fred appeared to be completely bowled over by what he would have denominated as this "side-splitter," and gave vent to an unearthly howl of merriment.

"Whatever is the matter?" cried his sister, entering the sitting-room. She and Gertrude had just come up together from the studio, where Conny had been pouring out her soul as to the hollowness of the world, a fact she was in the habit periodically of discovering. "Fred, what a shocking noise!"

"Oh, shut up, Con, and let a fellow alone," grumbled Fred, subsiding into a chair. "Conny's been dancing every night this week—making me take her, too, by Jove!—and now, if you please, she's got hot coppers."

Miss Devonshire deigned no reply to these remarks, and Phyllis, who, like all of them, was accustomed to occasional sparring between the brother and sister, threw herself into the breach.

"You're the very creature I want, Conny," she cried. "Come over here; perhaps you can enlighten me about the person who interests me more than any one in the world."

"Phyllis!" protested Fan, who understood the allusion.

"It's your man opposite," went on Phyllis, unabashed; "Lucy and I are longing to know all about him. There he is on the doorstep; why, he only went out half an hour ago!"

"That fellow," said Fred, with unutterable contempt; "that foreign-looking chap whom Conny dances half the night with?"

"Foreign-looking," said Phyllis, "I should just think he was! Why, he might have stepped straight out of a Venetian portrait; a Tintoretto, a Bordone, any one of those mellow people."

"Only as regards colouring," put in Lucy, whose interest in the subject appeared to be comparatively mild. "I don't believe those old Venetian nobles dashed about in that headlong fashion. I often wonder what his business can be that keeps him running in and out all day."

Fortunately for Constance, the fading light of the December afternoon concealed the fact that she was blushing furiously, as she replied coolly enough, "Oh, Frank Jermyn? he's an artist; works chiefly in black and white for the illustrated papers, I think. He and another man have a studio in York Place together."

"Is he an Englishman?"

"Yes; his people are Cornish clergymen."

"All of them? 'What, all his pretty ones?'" cried Phyllis; "but you are very interesting, Conny, to-day. Poor fellow, he looks a little lonely sometimes; although he has a great many oddly-assorted pals."

"By the bye," went on Conny, still maintaining her severely neutral tone, "he mentioned the photographic studio, and wanted to know all about 'G. and L. Lorimer.'"

"Did you tell him," answered Phyllis, "that if you lived opposite four beautiful, fallen princesses, who kept a photographer's shop, you would at least call and be photographed."

"It is so much nicer of him that he does not," said Lucy, with decision.

Phyllis struck an attitude:

she began, then stopped short suddenly.

"What a thundering row!" said Fred.

A curious, scuffling sound, coming from the room below, was distinctly audible.

"Mdlle. StÉphanie appears to be giving an afternoon dance," said Lucy.

"I will go and see if anything is the matter," remarked Gertrude, rising.

As a matter of fact she snatched eagerly at this opportunity for separating herself from this group of idle chatterers. She was tired, dispirited, beset with a hundred anxieties; weighed down by a cruel sense of responsibility.

How was it all to end? she asked herself, as, oblivious of Mdlle. StÉphanie's performance, she lingered on the little dusky landing. That first wave of business, born of the good-natured impulse of their friends and acquaintance, had spent itself, and matters were looking very serious indeed for the firm of G. and L. Lorimer.

"We couldn't go on taking Fred's guineas for ever," she thought, a strange laugh rising in her throat. "Perhaps, though, it was wrong of me to refuse to be interviewed by The Waterloo Place Gazette. But we are photographers, not mountebanks!" she added, in self-justification.

In a few minutes she had succeeded in suppressing all outward marks of her troubles, and had rejoined the people in the sitting-room.

"Mrs. Maryon says there is nothing the matter," she cried, with her delightful smile, "and that there is no accounting for these foreigners."

Laughter greeted her words, then Conny, rising and shaking out her splendid skirts, declared that it was time to go.

"Aren't you ever coming to see us?" she said, giving Gertrude a great hug. "Mama is positively offended, and as for papa—disconsolate is not the word."

"You must make them understand how really difficult it is for any of us to come," answered Gertrude, who had a natural dislike to entering on explanations in which such sordid matters as shabby clothes and the comparative dearness of railway tickets would have had to figure largely. "But we are coming one day, of course."

"I'll tell you what it is," cried Fred, as they emerged into the street, and stood looking round for a hansom; "Gertrude may be the cleverest, and Phyllis the prettiest, but Lucy is far and away the nicest of the Lorimer girls."

"Gerty is worth ten of her, I think," answered Conny, crossly. She was absorbed in furtive contemplation of a light that glimmered in a window above the auctioneer's shop opposite.

As the girls were sitting at supper, later on, they were startled by the renewal of those sounds below which had disturbed them in the afternoon.

They waited a few minutes, attentive; but this time, instead of dying away, the noise rapidly gathered volume, and in addition to the scuffling, their ears were assailed by the sound of shrill cries, and what appeared to be a perfect volley of objurgations. Evidently a contest was going on in which other weapons than vocal or verbal ones were employed, for the floor and windows of the little sitting-room shook and rattled in a most alarming manner.

Suddenly, to the general horror, Fanny burst into tears.

"Girls," she cried, rushing wildly to the window, "you may say what you like; but I am not going to stay and see us all murdered without lifting a hand. Help! Murder!" she shrieked, leaning half her body over the window-sill.

"For goodness' sake, Fanny, stop that!" cried Lucy, in dismay, trying to draw her back into the room. But her protest was drowned by a series of ear-piercing yells issuing from the room below.

"I will go and see what is the matter," said Gertrude, pale herself to the lips; for the whole thing was sufficiently blood-curdling.

"You'd better stay where you are," answered Lucy, in her most matter-of-fact tones, as she led the terrified Fan to an arm-chair.

Phyllis stood among them silent, gazing from one to the other, with that strange, bright look in her eyes, which with her betokened excitement; the unimpassioned, impersonal excitement of a spectator at a thrilling play.

"Certainly I shall go," said Gertrude, as a door banged violently below, to the accompaniment of a volley of polyglot curses.

"I will not stay in this awful house another hour," panted Fanny, from her arm-chair. "Gertrude, Gertrude, if you leave this room I shall die!"

With a sickening of the heart, for she knew not what horror she was about to encounter, Gertrude made her way downstairs, the cries and sounds of struggling growing louder at each step. At the bottom of the first flight she paused.

"Go back, Phyllis."

"It's no good, Gerty, I'm not going back."

"I am going to the shop; and if the Maryons are not there we must call a policeman."

Swiftly they went down the next flight, past the horrible doors, on the other side of which the battle was raging, still downwards, till they reached the little narrow hall. Here they drew up suddenly before a figure which barred the way.

Long afterwards Gertrude could recall the moment when she first saw Frank Jermyn under their roof; could remember distinctly—though all at the time seemed chaos—the sudden sensation of security that came over her at the sight of the kind, eager young face, the brilliant, steadfast eyes; at the sound of the manly, cheery voice.

There were no explanations; no apologies.

"There seems to be a shocking row going on," he said, lifting his hat; "I only hope that it does not concern any of you ladies."

In a few hurried words Gertrude told him what she knew of the state of affairs. Meanwhile the noise had in some degree subsided.

"Great heavens!" cried Frank; "there may be murder going on at this instant." And in less time than it takes to tell he had sprung past her, and was hammering with all his might at the closed door.

The girls followed timidly, and were in time to see the door fly open in response to the well-directed blows, and Mrs. Maryon herself come forward, pale but calm. Within the room all was now dark and silent.

Mrs. Maryon and the new comer exchanged a few hurried words, and the latter turned to the girls, who clung together a few paces off.

"There is no cause for alarm," he said. "Pray do not wait here. I will explain everything in a few minutes, if I may."

"Now please, Miss Lorimer, go back upstairs; there's nothing to be frightened at," chimed in Mrs. Maryon, with some asperity.

A few minutes afterwards Frank Jermyn knocked at the door of the Lorimers' sitting-room, and on being admitted, found himself well within the fire of four questioning pairs of feminine eyes.

"Pray sit down, sir," said Fan, who had been prepared for his arrival. "How are we ever to thank you?"

"There is nothing to thank me for, as your sisters can tell you," he said, bluntly. He looked a modest, pleasant little person enough as he sat there in his light overcoat and dress clothes, all the fierceness gone out of him. "I have merely come to tell you that nothing terrible has happened. It seems that the poor Frenchwoman below has been in money difficulties, and has been trying to put an end to herself. The Maryons discovered this in time, and it has been as much as they could do to prevent her from carrying out her plan. Hence these tears," he added, with a smile.

When once you had seen Frank Jermyn smile, you believed in him from that moment.

The girls were full of horror and pity at the tale.

"We have had a great shock," said Fan, wiping her eyes, with dignity. "Such a terrible noise. But you heard it for yourself."

A pause; the young fellow looked round rather wistfully, as though doubtful of what footing he stood on among them.

"We must not keep you," went on Fan, whose tongue was loosened by excitement; "no doubt (glancing at his clothes) you are going out to dinner."

She spoke in the manner of a fallen queen who alludes to the ceremony of coronation.

Frank rose.

"By the by," he said, looking down, "I have often wished—I have never ventured"—then looking up and smiling brightly, "I have often wondered if you included photographing at artists' studios in your work."

Lucy assured him that they did, and the young man asked permission to call on them the next day at the studio. Then he added—

"My name is Jermyn, and I live at Number 19, opposite."

"I think," said Lucy, in the candid, friendly fashion which always set people at their ease, "that we have an acquaintance in common, Miss Devonshire."

Jermyn acknowledged that such was the case; a few remarks on the subject were exchanged, then Frank went off to his dinner-party, having first shaken hands with each of the girls in all cordiality and frankness.

Mrs. Maryon came up in the course of the evening, to express her regret that the ladies had been frightened and disturbed; setting aside with cynical good-humour their anxious expressions of pity and sympathy for the heroine of the affair.

"It isn't for such as you to trouble yourselves about such as her," she said, "although I'm sorry enough for Steffany myself—and never a penny of last quarter's rent paid!"

"Poor woman," answered Lucy, "she must have been in a desperate condition."

"You see, miss," said Mrs. Maryon circumstantially, "she had been going on owing money for ever so long, though we knew nothing about it; and at last she was threatened with the bailiffs. Then what must she do but go down to the shop and make off with some of Maryon's bottles while we were at dinner. He found it out, and took one away from her this afternoon when you complained of the noise. Later he missed the second bottle, and went up to Steffany, who was uncorking it and sniffing it, and making believe she wanted to do away with herself."

"How unutterably horrible!" Gertrude shuddered.

"You heard how she went on when he tried to take it from her. Such strength as she has, too—it was as much as me and Maryon and the girl could do between us to hold her down."

"Where has she gone to now?" said Lucy.

"Oh, she don't sleep here, you know, miss. She's gone home with Maryon as meek as a lamb; took her bit of supper with us, quite cheerfully."

"What will she do, I wonder?"

"Ah," said Mrs. Maryon, thoughtfully; "there's no saying what she and many other poor creatures like her have to do. There'd be no rest for any of us if we was to think of that."

Gertrude lay awake that night for many hours; the events of the day had curiously shaken her. The story of the miserable Frenchwoman, with its element of grim humour, made her sick at heart.

Fenced in as she had hitherto been from the grosser realities of life, she was only beginning to realise the meaning of life. Only a plank—a plank between them and the pitiless, fathomless ocean on which they had set out with such unknowing fearlessness; into whose boiling depths hundreds sank daily and disappeared, never to rise again.

* * * * *

Mademoiselle StÉphanie actually put in an appearance the next morning, and made quite a cheerful bustle over the business of setting her house in order, preparatory to the final flitting.

Gertrude passed her on the stairs on her way to the studio, but feigned not to notice the other's morning greeting, delivered with its usual crispness. The woman's mincing, sallow face, with its unabashed smiles, sickened her.

Phyllis, who was with her, laughed softly. "She does not seem in the least put out by the little affair of yesterday," she said.

"Hush, Phyllis. Ah, there is the studio bell already. No doubt it is Mr. Jermyn," and she unconsciously assumed her most business-like air.

A day or two later Mademoiselle StÉphanie vanished for ever; and not long afterwards her place was occupied by a serious-looking umbrella-maker, who displayed no hankering for Mr. Maryon's bottles.