They lived together four months, Yvonne in her comfortable rooms, Joyce in his attic overhead. At first she had been helpless, requiring much aid both from Joyce and from the landlady, over whom she had cast her accustomed charm; but with the early spring weather she recovered full use of her limbs, and strength enough to fight her small battles for herself. To Joyce it had been a time of consolation in many black moods. He dreaded the arrival of the New Zealand mail, which he calculated would bring Yvonne her freedom. It was almost a relief when he assured himself by enquiries that no news had come from the Bishop. He had another month of Yvonne’s companionship to look forward to. When that passed, however, and the second mail from New Zealand proved as fruitless as the first, he was forced to look at matters from a practical point of view. He had already far exceeded the original advance he had made to Yvonne. Under the assurance that he would be reimbursed, he had not scrupled to spend money freely on little luxuries and comforts. At the present rate of living, therefore, another two months would see him at the end of his resources, which included money that he had received in advance for the copyright of his book. His current income from occasional journalism was ridiculously small. The new novel was only half-way towards completion. Poverty stared him in the face.

As a last resource he went to Everard’s bankers, but only to learn that his cousin had withdrawn his account. He found Yvonne anxiously awaiting the result of this errand. As he entered, she rose impulsively, scattering scissors and spool of cotton from her lap. She read his failure in his face.

“What is to be done?” she asked, when he had finished his report.

“I don’t know,” replied Joyce, truthfully.

He looked at her, puzzled and distressed.

“You must pay yourself out of the furniture and let me go,” said Yvonne.

“Where would you go to?”

“I don’t know,” said Yvonne in her turn.

At the picture of helpless dismay Joyce broke into a laugh.

“Oh, how can you laugh, when I owe you all this money?” she said, with a choke in her voice.

“Because I am glad, Yvonne, that fate seems to compel me to go on looking after you.”

“But how can you go on? How can I burden you any further?”

“Don’t talk about burdens,” he said gently. “You repay me twice over for what little I have given you.”

“But the furniture is not worth all that,” said Yvonne.

“What has the furniture to do with it?”

“Why it is yours, is n’t it?”

“How, mine?”

“The bill of sale,” replied Yvonne seriously.

“Oh, you dear little goose,” cried Joyce, “you don’t suppose I am going to sell you up!”

“Why not—if you need the money? The furniture is all your own.”

“How can it be when I don’t claim it?”

Yvonne shook her head. Ordinarily the most easily swayed of women, now and then she was inconvincible. She had got it into her head that the furniture had lapsed by sheer law of England into his possession, and no argument could move her. He explained that he could renew the bill. She dismissed the explanation with a little foreign gesture.

“I own nothing in the world but what I stand up in,” she persisted.

“Then you’re worse off than ever,” said Joyce.

“I am,” she said despondently. “Is n’t it strange to want money! I never knew what it was before.”

There was an odd pathos in her face that touched him.

“Cheer up, little woman. Nothing is ever so bad as it looks.”

Comforting words were nice, but they did not change the position. Money had to be obtained. Where was it to come from?

“I suppose I must write to Everard, since your letter has miscarried.”

“Letters don’t miscarry nowadays,” said Joyce. “They don’t even do so in novels. Still, you had better write. I wish you felt you need n’t.”

“So do I.”

“We shall have to part as soon as he cables a remittance.”

“Oh, I wish we could get along as we are,” said Yvonne. “I have been so happy here with you.”

“Then let us fight it out between us,” exclaimed Joyce resolutely. “You ’ll soon be able to get some singing lessons, and I ’ll find a situation as railway porter, or something, and we ’ll rub along somehow till better times.”

“Oh, you don’t know how much gladder I should be!” cried Yvonne with a sparkle in her eyes. “If I only could earn something—not be a drag upon you! Oh, I would sooner lead the life of a poor, poor woman, in the humblest way, than take Everard’s money—you know that.”

“We can’t go on living here,” said Joyce, gently.

“Of course not. We will go to much cheaper rooms and live like working-folks. I can do lots of things, lay fires, make pastry—”

“Dumplings will be as far as we can get,” said Joyce.

“Well, then, they ’ll be beautiful dumplings,” said Yvonne.

“And I dare say we can find a way to settle the furniture question,” said Joyce. “I shall begin to look about for a cheap place at once.” So the trouble fell from Yvonne for a time. Now that she had decided to make no further appeal to Everard, but to endeavour once more to earn her livelihood, she felt lighter-hearted. Her attachment to Stephen had grown so strong that she had contemplated the loss of his daily protection with dismay. The solitary life frightened her. The vicissitudes through which she had passed, the loss of her voice especially, had taken away her nerve. At first, she had been so weak from her long illness and her helpless arm, that she found Stephen’s presence an unspeakable comfort, and did not speculate upon any anomaly in her position. By the time she regained health, their life under the same roof appeared in the natural order of every-day things. And it was very pleasant. Besides, with the daily intercourse, came a deeper comprehension of his shipwreck. She began to realise that the material dependence on her side was reciprocated by a spiritual dependence on his. It awoke new and delicious stirrings of pride to feel her influence over him, to find herself of use to a man. Once she could sing, amuse—yield her lips with kind passivity to satisfy strange unknown needs. She had regarded herself with wistful seriousness in her relations with men, as a poor little instrument for men to play on. They fingered the stops, extracted what music they could, and then laid the pipe aside while they devoted themselves to the business of the world. But Stephen approached her differently from other men. He did not want her for her voice; he did not throw himself weary into a chair and say, “Chatter and amuse me;” and he did not look at her with eyes yearning for her lips. But his needs, quite other than she had known before, were revealing themselves to her with gradual distinctness. She was learning his humbled pride, his lacerated self-respect, his ingrained sense of degradation, his crying need of sympathy and encouragement and ennobling object in life. The strong man came to her, Yvonne, to be healed and strengthened; and, from some fresh-discovered fountain within her, she was finding remedy for maladies and sustaining draughts for weakness. A new conception of herself was dawning before her, in a great, quiet happiness; and her nature unconsciously expanded.

Thus a twofold instinct urged her to throw in her lot with Joyce.

He passed a very anxious week. It seemed as if his old bitter and fruitless search for work was to be repeated. Neither could he find suitable apartments. “I’m afraid it will have to come to the workhouse,” he said in dejected jest.

“Oh, that will never do!” cried Yvonne. “They would separate us.”

She had been more successful. Two or three of the ex-pupils to whom she had written had replied, promising their recommendation. With a shrewdness that won Joyce’s admiration she used the address of her former agents, who willingly forwarded her letters. But the sight of the familiar office, whither she had gone to beg this favour, had brought her a bitter pang of regret for the lost voice. She had cried all the way home and then looked anxiously in the glass, afraid lest Joyce should perceive the traces of her tears. She strove valiantly to cheer him in his worries.

At last Joyce went to his friend, the secondhand bookseller in Islington, whom he had seen less frequently since his life with Yvonne, and there, to his delighted surprise, found a solution for all his difficulties. The old man was growing too infirm to carry on the business single-handed. He wanted an assistant “And where am I to get one?” he said querulously. “I don’t want a damned fool who does n’t know an Elzevir from a Catnach.”

“I ’ll come like a shot if you ’ll have me,” said Joyce, eagerly.

“You? Why, you’re a gentleman and a scholar,” said the old man.

“So much the better,” returned Joyce, laughing. “There will be something mediaeval about the arrangement.”

The bargain was quickly struck. Furthermore, when Joyce explained his domestic considerations, the old man offered him, at a small rent, three rooms in the house, above the shop. There they were, he said; they were not used; he once took in lodgers, but they pestered his life out; so he had made up his mind not to be worried with them any more. However, Joyce was an exception. He was quite welcome to them; he himself only wanted a bedroom and the little back-parlour on the ground-floor.

These reserved quarters, the vacant three rooms and a kitchen with an adjoining servant’s bedroom, made up the internal arrangements of the old-fashioned, rather dilapidated house. Joyce went up to inspect. At first his heart sank. The rooms were only half-furnished, the paper was mouldy, dirt abounded, the ceilings were low and blackened. However, many of these drawbacks could be remedied. Mr. Runcle promised a thorough cleansing and repapering, whereat Joyce’s spirits rose again. Next to the sitting-room was a fair-sized bedroom for Yvonne; upstairs a little room for himself. He enquired about attendance. The old man explained that a woman lived on the premises. She did for him and would doubtless be glad to do for Joyce also, for a small sum per week.

By the end of a few days they were settled in their new abode. The bits of furniture, that had been the subject of such dispute, made the place habitable. Re-papered and whitewashed and hung with curtains and a few pictures out of Yvonne’s salvage, it looked almost cosy. But the threadbare carpet and rug, the horsehair sofa, and odd, rickety chairs and the small-paned, cheaply-painted windows gave it an aspect of poverty that nothing could efface.

“It’s not a palace,” said Joyce ruefully, looking round him on the day they took definite possession. “You will miss many comforts, Yvonne.”

“I’m not going to miss anything,” she replied, “except worry and anxiety. I am going to be perfectly happy here.”

“You don’t know what a sweet incongruity you are among these surroundings,” he said; “you remind one of a dainty piece of lace sewn on to corduroys. Oh, I hope this life won’t be too rough for you—we shall have to practise so many miserable little economies—coals, gas, food—”

Yvonne broke into a sunny laugh. “Oh, that’s just like a man! Did you ever hear of a well-regulated woman that did n’t love to economise? When I was at Fulminster, you have no idea how I cut down expenses!”

She turned to take off her hat before the discoloured gilt mirror over the mantelpiece, and then threw it quickly on the round centre table and faced him again.

“I shall be quite as happy here as I was in Fulminster. Perhaps happier, in a sense. You know, I always felt so small in that big house. This just suits me.”

Thus began the odd life together of these two waifs, abandoned by the world. The previous four months had been invested with an air of transience. Yvonne’s presence beneath the same roof as Joyce had been a temporary arrangement until supplies should come from the Bishop. They had not joined in housekeeping. Whenever Joyce went down to Yvonne, he had done so purely in the character of a visitor. From that state of things to this life in common was a great step. And yet to each it seemed natural. Society being unaware of their existence, they felt no particular need of observing Society’s conventions. To the old bookseller, to the servant, to each other, they were brother and sister, and that was enough.

Joyce found his work fairly light. The important part of the business was carried on by orders through the post. Purchases of “rare and curious books” at prices per volume from three pounds upwards are rarely made casually over the counter. Joyce knew this, of course, but he was nevertheless surprised at the extensiveness of Ebenezer Runcle’s connection. Every morning there was considerable correspondence to be got through, parcels of books to be made up and despatched, the slips for the monthly catalogue to be kept up to date. After that, if no new stock was brought in, there was little else to do but wait for customers. The long spells of leisure were invaluable to him for writing. He found his mind worked smoothly in the quiet, musty atmosphere of the books. There they were in brilliant rows around the walls, on bookcases running longitudinally through the shop, piled in stacks by the doorway, in comers, upon trestles, anywhere. A great rampart of them cut off the draught of the door. In the small enclosed space thus formed was a stove, on one side of which he placed his writing-table, while on the other, in a dilapidated cane armchair, sat the old man, a bent, wheezing figure, deep in his beloved patristic literature.

At intervals during the day he saw Yvonne, who was proud and happy in the superintendence of her humble establishment. Not long after the move, some welcome singing-lessons came, at a house in Russell Square, and enabled her to contribute her mite towards the household expenses. It was a hard problem to make ends meet sometimes, on what Joyce was able to set apart for housekeeping, and at first, through lack of experience in close economy, she made dreadful blunders. Then she came in tearful penitence to Joyce. On one of these occasions, he had arrived for dinner, and found her gazing piteously upon three meatless bones, standing like ribs of wreck in a beach of potatoes. She had thought enough had been left from yesterday for two more meals. He consoled her as best he could, and tackled the potatoes. But she watched him with so miserable and remorse-stricken a face that at last he broke out laughing. And then, Yvonne, who was quick to see the light side of things, laughed too and forgot her troubles. After a time, no housewife in the neighbourhood kept a shrewder eye upon the butcher.

The evenings they usually spent together, working or talking. Now and then, at Joyce’s invitation, the old man would come in, and the trio would talk literature, the old man vaunting the ancients and Joyce defending the moderns, until a veritable Battle of the Books was recontested, while Yvonne sat by, in awed silence, wondering at the vastness of human learning. Often he wrote or discussed the novel with her. In this she took the deepest interest. The intellectual processes involved were a perpetual mystery to her, and caused her to place Joyce on a pinnacle of genius. But her sympathy and enthusiasm helped him as few other things could. And gradually her influence made itself felt in his writing. His sympathies widened, his aspect upon life softened. Planned to reveal the bitter sordidness of broken lives, and half written in a grey, hopeless atmosphere, imperceptibly the book lost in harshness, grew in tenderness and humanity. And this corresponded to the softening in the nature of the man himself.

Yet now and then incidents occurred that brought back the past in all its gloom. One in particular weighed for many days afterwards upon his mind.

It was a sultry night. He had come out for a stroll down Upper Street and High Street, before going to bed. Outside the Angel, the limit of his walk, he lingered a moment and was looking with idle interest at the great block of omnibuses, when he became aware that a poorly-dressed woman was standing by him, gazing rigidly into his face. He started, tried to fix her identity.

“Good God! It is you!” said the woman.

Then he remembered. It was Annie Stevens, the girl who had betrayed him so miserably to the theatrical company years before.

“Won’t you speak to me?” she asked, somewhat humbly, as he remained silent.

“You recall a very bitter time to me,” said Joyce.

“Do you think it is any sweeter to me?” she asked.

And then, with a quick glance round at an approaching policeman:—

“Walk on a little way with me, will you?”

He hesitated for a moment, but a beseeching look in her eyes touched him. Her presence at that place, at that hour, spoke of tragedy. She had never been pretty. Now she had grown thin and hard-featured.

“You need n’t fear I’m going to ask you for anything—you of all people in the world. Of course, if you don’t want to be seen with me, don’t come. You can’t hurt me. I’m past that. But I’d like to speak with you for a minute or two.”

He had moved on with her while she was talking. Then there were a few moments’ silence.

“Well?” he enquired. “What do you wish to say?”

“God knows—anything—just to ask you, perhaps, whether you’re right again. I have thought of you enough.”

He glanced at her curiously.

“Why have you come to this?”

“Why did you go to prison?” she retorted.

“I did wrong and was punished for it.”

“So did I. This is my punishment. After you had gone, I could have torn my heart out. I went on the drink—could n’t get engagements—went downhill. I can’t go much lower, can I? If you want revenge, you ’ve got it.”

She tossed her head in her old, defiant way. Joyce, perceiving her association of himself in her downfall, felt somewhat moved with pity.

“God knows, revenge is the last thing I want. On the contrary, I am distressed to see you come to this. If I could help you, I would do so. But that, you know as well as I, is out of my power.”

“Yes; the only thing you could do, would be to marry me and make an honest woman of me, and that is n’t likely,” she said, cynically.

“No, it is n’t likely,” said Joyce. “I can only be deeply sorry for you.”

“I wonder whether you could tell what it is to me to talk to you even in this way. Oh, God! if you knew how I longed to see you!”

“Why did you act as you did toward me?” he asked.

“I don’t know. Don’t ask me. Because every woman’s got a tiger in her somewhere, I suppose. I used to think men were the brutes. Now I know it’s women. We’re all the same. I hate myself. I wish you would take me up a back street and kill me. This is a hell of a life. Do you remember the last words you said to me? ‘Some people are better dead.’ It’s the truest thing I ’ve ever heard from man or woman.”

“It’s easy enough to get out of the world, if we want to,” said Joyce. “But perhaps it’s better to fight it out. You must make an effort and get out of this life—a proud girl like you.”

“I have n’t much pride left.”

“I thought so too. But it takes a lot of killing. I ’ve come out fairly straight. Why shouldn’t you?”

“I ’ll come out straight, the only way—a corpse. But I’m glad things are better with you. It relieves me to know it. I thought I had sent you to the devil, and that’s why I went there myself, I suppose. Well, I won’t keep you any longer. I know you hate being seen with me.”

“Can’t I do anything for you?” said Joyce, feeling in his pocket.

“Yes—flay me alive by offering me money. You did once—do you remember?”

She stopped abruptly, took Joyce’s proffered hand, and said in a softer voice:—

“It’s good of you to shake hands with me. Men are better than women. Thank God I ’ve seen you at last. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye,” said Joyce, kindly.

They parted, and went their different ways, Annie Stevens to the horror of her life and Joyce to the home that held Yvonne. The parallel and the contrast smote him as he walked along the familiar street. Both himself and this girl that had fallen were derelicts, both were expiating the past, both were carrying within them a degraded self, that with a nobler self waged cruel and eternal warfare. For the injury she had done him he cherished no resentment. He felt a great pity for her, and judged her gently.

It was strange how his rudderless course through the last six years had been influenced by other lonely and drifting craft. Annie Stevens, who had loved and nearly wrecked him, had been the cause of his linking fortunes with poor Noakes; and it was through Yvonne—with whom, sweetest of derelicts, he was now voyaging on unruffled waters—that he had first drifted towards Annie Stevens. He was pondering over this one day during an idle hour in the shop with the old bookseller, when a whimsical fancy seized him.

“You lead a very lonely life, Mr. Runcle,” he said suddenly.

“Yes,” replied the old man. “I suppose I do. Beyond one sister, who has been dying for many months, I have neither kith nor kin in the world.”