She continued to walk slowly; the slowness was as remarkable as her haste had been. She had intended, had she missed Edgar, to go to an hotel; but home was hotel enough, hotel home. Home—home to a house without privacy—home to children of whom she was not much more than technically the mother—home to an asbestos log and to the absence of a husband that was at least as desirable as his presence: nothing else remained.

For her lack seemed total—so total as hardly to be a lack. She desired no one thing, and a desire for everything is an abuse of the term "desire." So she walked slowly, stopping now and then to look at a flagstone as if it had been a remarkable object. And as she walked she wondered how she had come to be as she was.

She could not see where her life had gone wrong. She did not remember any one point at which she had taken a false and crucial step. For example, she did not think this grey and harmonious totality of despondency had come of her marrying Cosimo. They were neither outstandingly suited nor unsuited to one another, and a thousand marriages precisely similar were made every day and turned out well enough. No; it could not be that she had expected too much of marriage. She had not courted disappointment that way.... (But stay: had the trouble come of her not expecting largely enough? Of her not having assumed enough? Of her not having said to Life, "Such and such I intend to have, and you shall provide it?" Would she have fared better then?)... And if Cosimo had brought her no wonder, neither had her babes. People were in the habit of saying astonishing things about the miracle of the babe at the breast, but Amory could only say that she had never experienced these things. She had wondered that she should not, when so many others apparently did, but the fact remained, that bearing had been an anguish and nursing an inconvenience. And so at the twins she had stopped.

Would it have been better had she not stopped? Would she have been happier with many children? Without children at all? Or unmarried? Or ought her painting to have been husband, home and children to her?...

It was a little late in the day to ask these questions now——

And yet there had been no reason for asking them earlier——

It had needed that, her first point of knowledge, to bring it home into her heart....

But do not suppose that she was in any pain. As a spinally-anaesthetized subject may have a quite poignant interest in the lopping off of one of his own limbs, and may even wonder that he feels no local pain, so she assisted at her own dismemberment. Home, husband, babes, her art—one after another she now seemed to see them go—or rather, seemed to see that they had long since gone. She saw this going, in retrospect. It was as if, though only degree by degree had the pleasant things of life ticked away from her, the escapement was now removed from her memory, allowing all with a buzz to run down to a dead stop. She could almost hear that buzz, almost see that soft rim of whizzing teeth....

Now all was stillness—stillness without pain. She knew now what Edgar Strong had been doing. She knew that he had been making use of her, pocketing Cosimo's money, using the "Novum's" office as his lodging, had had his bed there, his slippers in the fender, his kettle, his cocoa, his plates, his cups, his.... And she knew now that Edgar Strong was only one of those who had clustered like leeches about Cosimo.... She forgot how much Cosimo had said that from first to last it had all cost. She thought twenty thousand pounds. Twenty thousand pounds, all vanished between that first Ludlow experiment and that last piece of amateur sociology, three revolver shots in a man's back! As a price it was stiffish. She did not quite know what the provider of the money had had out of it all. At any rate she herself had this curious stilly state of painless but rather sickening knowledge. And knowledge, they say, is above rubies. So perhaps it was cheap after all....

But where had she gone wrong? Had she simply been born wrong? Would it have made any difference whatever she had done? Or had all this been appointed for her or ever her mother had conceived her?

She asked herself this as she passed Whitefield's Tabernacle; still walking slowly, she was well up Hampstead Road and still no answer had occurred to her. But somewhere near the gold-beater's arm on the right-hand side of the road a thought did strike her. She thought that she would not go home after all. This was not because to go home now would be inglorious; it was no attempt to keep up appearances; it was merely that she would have preferred anything to this horrible numbness. Pain would be better. It is at any rate a condition of pain that you must be alive to feel it, and she did not feel quite alive. This might be a dream from which she would presently wake, or a waking from which she would by and by drop off to sleep again. In either case it was more than she could bear for much longer, and, did she go home, she would have to bear it throughout the night—for days—until Cosimo came back—after that——

But where else to go, if not to The Witan? To Laura's? To Dickie's? That would be the same thing as going home: little enough change from spinal anaesthesia in that! They could not help. Of all her old associates, there was hardly one but might—that was to say if anything extraordinary ever happened to them, like suddenly getting to know something—there was hardly one of them but might experience precisely this same hopeless perfection of wrongness, and fail to discover any one point at which it had all begun. It was rather to be hoped (Amory thought) that they never would get to know anything. They were happier as they were, in a self-contained and harmonious ignorance. Knowledge attained too late was rather dreadful; people ought to begin to get it fairly early or not at all. They ought to begin at about the age of Corin and Bonniebell....

A month ago the last person she would have gone to with a trouble would have been Dorothy Tasker. They had not a single view in common. Moreover, it would have been humiliating. But now that actually became, in a curious, reflex sort of way, a reason for going. She did not know that she actually wished to be humiliated; she did not think about it; but she had been looking at herself, and at people exactly like herself, for a long, long, long time, and, when you have looked at yourself too much you can sometimes actually find out something new about yourself by looking for a change at somebody else as little like you as can possibly be found. Amory had tried a good many things, but she had never tried this. It might be worth trying. She hesitated for one moment longer. This was when she feared that Dorothy might offer her, not the change from numbness to pain, but a sympathy and consolation that, something deep down within her told her, would not help her.... A little more quickly, but not much, she walked up Maiden Road. She turned into Fleet Road, and reached the tram-terminus below Hampstead Heath Station. Thence to Dorothy's was a bare five minutes. What she should say when she got to Dorothy's she did not trouble to think.

And at first it looked as if she would not be allowed to say anything at all to her, for when she rang the bell of the hall-floor flat Stan himself opened the door, looked at her with no great favour, and told her that Dorothy was not to be seen. From that Amory gathered that Dorothy was at least within.

Now when your need of a thing is very great, you are not to be put off by a young man who admits that his wife is at home, but tells you that she has some trifling affair—is in her dressing-gown perhaps, or has not made her hair tidy—that makes your call slightly inconvenient. Therefore Amory, in her need, did what the young man would no doubt have called "an infernally cheeky thing." She repeated her request once more, and then, seeing another refusal coming, waited for no further reply, but pushed past Stan and made direct for Dorothy's bedroom. Why she should have supposed that Dorothy would be in her bedroom she could not have told. She might equally well have been in the dining-room, or in the pond-room. But along the passage to the bedroom Amory walked, while Stan stared in stupefaction after her.

Dorothy was there. She had not gone to bed, but, early as it was, appeared to have been preparing to do so. Amory knew that because, though in Britomart Belchamber's case a dressing-gown and plaited hair might merely have meant that she wanted to listen to Walter Wyron's talk in looseness and comfort, or else that a plaster cast was to be taken, they certainly did not mean that in Dorothy's. And she supposed that differences of that kind were more or less what she had come to see.

Dorothy was gazing into the fire before which the youngest Bit had had his bath. Close to her own chair was drawn the chair that had evidently been lately occupied by Stan. The infant Bit's cot was in a corner of the room. At first Dorothy did not look up from the fire. Probably she supposed the person who was looking at her from the doorway to be Stan.

But as that person neither spoke nor advanced, she turned her head. The next moment a curious little sound had come from her lips. You see, in the first place, she had expected nobody less, and in the second place, she wholeheartedly shared many of her worldly old aunt's prejudices, among which was the monstrous one that established a connexion between recently-bibbed politicians in this country and revolver shots in another. And there was no doubt whatever that her presentable but brainless young husband had fostered this fallacious conviction. He might even have gone so far as to say that Amory herself was not altogether unresponsible....

And that, too, in a sense, was what Amory had come for.

The eyes of the two women met, Amory's at the door, Dorothy's startled ones looking over her shoulder; blue ones and shallow brook-brown ones; and then Dorothy half rose.

But whatever the first expression of her face had been, it hardly lasted for a quarter of an instant. Alarm instantly took its place. She had begun to get up as a person gets up who would ask another person what he is doing there. Now it was as if, though she did not yet know what it was, there was something to be done, something practical and with the hands, without a moment's delay.

"What's the matter?" she cried. "Cried" is written, but her exclamation actually gained in emphasis from the fact that, not to wake the Bit, she voiced it in a whisper.

For a moment Amory wondered why she should speak like that. Then it occurred to her that the face of a person under spinal anaesthesia might in itself be a reason. She had forgotten her face.

"May I come in?" she asked.

She took Dorothy's "Shut the door—and speak low, please—what do you want?" as an intimation that she might. Amory entered. But she was not asked to sit down. The man who runs with a fire-call, or fetches a doctor in the night, is not asked to sit down, and some urgency of that kind appeared to be Dorothy's conception of Amory's visit.

"What do you want?" she demanded again.

Amory herself felt foolish at her own reply. It was so futile, so piteous, so true. She stood as helpless as a Bit before Dorothy.

"I—I don't know," she said.

"What's the matter? What are you looking like that for? Has anything happened to Cosimo?"

"No. No. No. He's coming home. No. Nothing's happened."

"Can I be of use to you?" She was prepared to be that.

"No—yes—I don't know——"

Dorothy's eyes had hardened a little.—"Do you want something—and if you don't—had you to come—to-night?"

Amory spoke quite quickly and eagerly.

"Oh yes—to-night—it had to be to-night—I had to come to-night——"

Dorothy's eyes grew harder still.

"Then I think I know what you mean.... I don't think we'll talk about it. There's really nothing to be said.—So——"

Amory was vaguely puzzled. Of Dorothy's relation to Sir Benjamin she knew nothing. Dorothy appeared to be waiting for her to go. That would mean back to The Witan. But she had come here expressly to avoid going back to The Witan. Again she spoke foolishly.

"Cosimo's coming back," she said.

"My aunt thought he might be," said Dorothy in an even voice.

"And I was going away—but I'm not now——"

"Oh?"

"May I sit down?"

She did so, with her doubled fists thrust between her knees and her head a little bowed. Then her eyes wandered sideways slowly round the room. Dorothy's blouse was thrown on the wide bed; from under the bed the baby Bit's bath peeped; and on the blouse lay Dorothy's hairbrushes.

Amory was thinking of another bed, a bed she had never seen, with portmanteaus on it, and a patched old waistcoat cast underneath it, and a girl busily packing at it, a girl whose voice she had heard pouting "You might buy me a trousseau—"

Dorothy also had sat down, but only on the edge of her chair. And she thought it would be best to speak a little more plainly.

"If you'll come to-morrow I shall know better what to say to you," she said. "You see, you've taken me by surprise. I didn't think you'd come, and I don't know now what you've come for. It isn't a thing to talk about, certainly not to-day. I should have liked to-day to myself. But if you feel that you must—will you come in again to-morrow?"

But Amory hardly seemed to hear. Her eyes were noting the appointments of the bedroom again. The time had been when she would at once have denounced the room as overcrowded and unhygienic. A cot, and a bed with two pillows ... in some respects her own plan was to be preferred. But this again was the kind of thing she had come to see, and she admitted that these things were more or less governed by what people could afford. From the kicked and scratched condition of the front of the chest of drawers she imagined that Dorothy's children must romp all over the flat. A parti-coloured ball lay under the cot where the baby slept. There was a rubber bath-doll near it. The two older boys would be sleeping in the next room.

She spoke again.—"I was going away," she said, dully, "with somebody."

Once more Dorothy merely said "Oh?"

Then it occurred to Amory that perhaps Dorothy did not quite understand.

"I mean with—with somebody not my husband."

She had half expected that Dorothy would be shocked, or at least surprised; but she seemed to take it quite coolly. Dorothy, as a matter of fact, was not surprised in the very least. She too guessed at the futility of looking for a starting-point of things that grow by inevitable and infinitesimal degrees. It was rather sad, but not at all astonishing. On Amory's own premises, there was simply no reason why she shouldn't. So again she merely said "Oh?" and added after a moment, "But you're not?"

"No."

"How's that? Has what we've heard to-day made you change your mind?"

Again Amory was slightly puzzled; and at Dorothy's question she had, moreover, a sudden little hesitation. Was it after all necessary that Dorothy should know everything? Would it not be sufficient, without going into details, to let Dorothy suppose she had changed her mind? It came to the same thing in the end.... Besides, Edgar Strong had not refused her that night. He had not even known of her presence in the office. Of the rest she would make a clean breast, but it was no good bothering Dorothy with that other.... She was still plunged into a sort of stupor, but these reflections stirred ever so slightly under the surface of it....

Then "what we've heard to-day" struck her. She repeated the words.

"What we've heard to-day?"

"Oh, if you haven't heard.... I only mean about the murder of my uncle," said Dorothy coldly.

This was far more than Amory could take in. She reflected for a moment. Then, "What do you say, Dorothy?" she asked slowly.

"At least he wasn't my uncle really. I liked him better than any of my uncles."

"Do you mean Sir Benjamin Collins?"

It was as if Amory had not imagined that Sir Benjamin could by any possibility have been anybody's uncle.

"I called him uncle," said Dorothy, in a voice that she tried to keep steady. "Before I could say the word—I called him——." But she decided not to risk the baby-word she had used—"Unnoo"——

It seemed to Amory a remarkable little coincidence.

"I—I didn't know," she said stupidly.

"No."

"You—you mean you—knew him?——"

"Oh ... oh yes."

Amory said again that she hadn't known....

"Then why," Dorothy would have liked to cry aloud, "have you come, if it isn't to make matters worse by talking about it? That wouldn't have surprised me very much! I should have been quite prepared for you to apologize! It's the kind of thing you would do. I don't think very much of you, you see"... But again that worse than frightened look on her visitor's face struck her sharply, and again a remark of her aunt's returned to her: "They puzzle their brains till their bodies suffer, and overwork their bodies till they're little better than fools." Suddenly she gave her sometime friend more careful attention.

"Amory—," she said all at once.

Amory had her fists between her knees again.—"What?" she said without looking up.

"You just said something about—going away. I want to ask you something. You haven't ...?"

The meaning was quite plain.

As if she had been galvanized, Amory looked sharply up.—"How dare——", she began.

But it was only a flash in the pan. Dorothy was looking into her eyes.

"You're telling me the truth?" She hated to ask the question.

"Yes," Amory mumbled, dropping her head again.

"Has Cosimo been unkind to you?"

"No."

"Nor neglected you?"

"No."

"Has—has anybody been unkind to you?" She could not speak of "somebody" by name.

Here Amory hesitated, and finally lied. It was rather a good sign that she did so. It meant returning animation....

"No," she said.

"Then what has happened?"

"Nothing. That's what I asked myself. That's just it. Nothing. Nothing at all's happened."

Dorothy spoke in a low voice, as if to herself.—"I know," she murmured....

And, on the chance that she really did know, Amory clutched at the sleeve of Dorothy's dressing-gown almost excitedly.

"Yes, that's what I mean ... you do know?" she asked in a quick whisper.

"Yes—no—I'm not sure——"

"But you do know that—nothing happening, nothing at all, and everything happening—everything? That's what I mean—that's what I want to know—that's why I came——"

"Don't speak so loudly. Put your hands to the fire; they're like ice. Wait; I'll get you a shawl; you're shivering.... Now I want you to tell me some things...."

And, first wrapping her up and putting Stan's pillow behind her back, she began to question her.

What, again, was the purport of her questions? What of those of her aunt? What of those of a good many others in an age that is producing, and for some mysterious reason or other counts it a sign of progress to produce, innumerable Amorys—so many that, stretch out your hand where you will, and you will touch one?

All is guessing: but it will pass on the time if we hold a Meeting about it now. Everybody is agreed that the way to arrive at the best conclusions is to hold a Meeting, and this will be only one more Meeting added to the cloud of Meetings in which the "Novum" went up and out—the Meeting which, as Edgar Strong had prophesied, the loyal London Indians held (in the Imperial Institute) in order to dissociate themselves from the Collins affair (as Edgar Strong had also prophesied, Mr. Wilkinson moved an amendment, "That this Meeting declines to dissociate itself, etc. etc.")—the numerous secondary Meetings that arose out of that Meeting—the Meetings of the "Novum's" creditors (for Edgar Strong in his haste to be off had omitted to pay all the bills)—the Meetings at which (Cosimo Pratt having withdrawn his support) the Eden and the Suffrage Shop had to be reconstructed—the Meetings convened to talk about this, that and the other—as many of them as you like.

Let us too, then, hold a nice, jolly Meeting, in order to find out what was the matter with Amory—a Meeting with Mr. Brimby in the Chair, to tell us that there is a great deal to be said on both sides, and that no party has a monopoly of Truth, and that the words that ought always to be on our lips as we hurl ourselves into the thickest and hottest of the fray, whatever it may be, are "To know all is to forgive all."

But let us keep our Meeting as quiet as we can, for we shall have no end of a crowd of Meeting-lovers there if we don't. The Wyrons will of course have to be admitted, and Mr. Wilkinson, and Dickie Lemesurier, and a few of the older students of the McGrath; but we do not particularly want the others—those who feel that in a better and brighter world they would have been students of the McGrath, but, as matters stand, are merely young clerks who can draw a little, young salesmen who can write a little, young auctioneers with an instinct for the best in sculpture, young foremen who yearn to express themselves in music, young governesses (or a few of them) who have heard of the enormous sums of money to be made by playwriting, New Imperialists, amateur regenerators, social prophets after working-hours, and, in a word, all the people who have just heard that it is not true that Satan is yet bound up for his promised stretch of a thousand years. A terrible number of them will get in whether we wish it or not; but let the rest be our own little party; and you shall sit next to Britomart Belchamber, and I will stand by to open the windows in case we feel the need of a little fresh air.

So Mr. Brimby will open the proceedings. He will say the things above-mentioned, and presently, with emotion and his sense of the world's sorrow gaining on him, will come to the case of their dear friend Amory Pratt. Here, he will say, is a young woman, one of themselves, who does not know what is the matter with her—who does not know what has become of her joy—who cannot understand (if Mr. Brimby may be allowed to express himself a little poetically) why the bloom of her life has turned to an early rime. And so (Mr. Brimby will continue), knowing that if two heads are better than one, two hundred heads must be just one hundred times better still, their friend has submitted her case to the Meeting. He will beg them to approach that case sympathetically. Let the extremists of the one part (if there be any) balance the extremists of the other, leaving as an ideal and beautiful middle nullity those words he had used before, but did not apologize for using again—to know all is to forgive all. And with these few remarks (if we are lucky), Mr. Brimby will say no more, but will call upon their friend Mr. Walter Wyron to state his view of their friend's case.

Then Walter will get up, with his hands in the pockets of his knickers, and it will not be his fault if he does not get off an epigram or two of the "Love is Law" kind. But you will not fail to notice that Walter is not his ordinary jaunty self. The withdrawal of Cosimo's support is going to hit him rather hard, and glances will be exchanged, and one or two will whisper behind their hands, "Isn't Walter beginning to live a little on his reputation?" Still, Walter will contribute his quotum. We shall hear that, in his opinion, the Cause of Synthetic Protoplasm is making such vast strides to-day that we must revise every one of our estimates in the light of the most recent knowledge, having done which we shall probably find that what is really the matter with Amory is that, by comparison with the mechanical appliances of Loeb and Delage—appliances which he will take leave to call the Womb of the Workshop—their friend Amory is over-vitalized.

Then Mr. Wilkinson will spring to his feet. And Mr. Wilkinson also will be more than a little sore about Cosimo's cowardly backsliding. He will say first of all that their Chairman, as usual, is talking out of his hat, and that anybody with a grain of sense knew that to know all was to have a contempt for all; and then he will point out that all the trouble had come of shillyshallying with the wrong policy. Under Strong's direction of the "Novum," he will say, Amory had been hitting the air to no purpose; whereas had he, Mr. Wilkinson, been allowed a chance, they would have had the proletariat armed with rifles by this, and Pratt's wife would have been a tricoteuse, doing a bit of knitting conspiratoriably and domestically useful at one and the same time—would have worn a Phrygian cap, and carried a pike, and sung "A la Lanterne," and put a bit of fire into the men! That's what she ought to have done, and have had a bit of a run for her money, instead of shillyshallying about with that idiot Strong——

And then a maiden speech will be given us. Mr. Raffinger, of the McGrath, will get timidly but resolutely up, and we shall all applaud him when he says that the bad old rÉgime at the McGrath was at the bottom of all the mischief. The stupid old Professors of the past had tried to drill instruction into the students instead of allowing each one to do exactly as he pleased and so to find his own soul. Amory had been crushed under the cruel old Juggernaut of discipline. But that, happily, was a thing of the past at the McGrath. Now they went on the more enlightened principles laid down by SÉguin, who cured a child of destructiveness by giving it a piece of priceless Venetian glass to play with, and when he broke it gave it another unique piece, and then another, and another after that, and another, until by degrees the child learned, and would never have to unlearn (that was the important thing!) that it was very naughty to break valuable Venetian glass. (A "Hear hear" from Mr. Brimby, which will probably prove so disconcerting to young Mr. Raffinger that he will sit down as suddenly as if Mr. Wilkinson had discharged two bullets at him).

And then Laura Wyron will speak, saying tremulously that she can't understand why Amory isn't happy when she has those two lovely babies; but she is not happy, and never will be again, because she has turned her back on her art; and Britomart Belchamber (who will be hoisted to her feet because she has lived in the same house with Amory, and may have something interesting and intimate to say) will doubt whether Amory has always quite closed the sweat-ducts with a cold sponge; and then the crowd will rush in—the governess playwrights will say what they think, the clerk sculptors what they think, and everybody else what he or she thinks—and presently they will have strayed a little from the business in hand, and will be discussing Cubism, or Matriarchy, or Toe-posts, or the Revival of the Ballad, or Rufty Tufty, quite beyond Mr. Brimby's power to hale them back to the proper subject. And so the Meeting will have to be adjourned, and we shall all go again to-morrow night, when Mr. Wilkinson will be in the Chair, and there ought to be some fun——

But Edgar Strong will not be there, because he will be on the water, and Cosimo will not be there, because he will be anxiously counting what money remains to him, and Mr. Prang will not be there, because he will be under arrest in Bombay. But, except for these absences, it will be a perfectly ripping Meeting——

But none of these things were Dorothy's business. Instead, by the time she had finished her questioning of Amory, there was no thought at all in her breast, save only the pitiful desire to help. She saw before her an old young woman, more drained and disillusioned and with less to look forward to at thirty-odd than her aunt had at seventy. Her very presence in Dorothy's house that night was a confession of it. It was the last house she would willingly have gone to, and yet there she was, begging Dorothy to tell her what had happened to her. And there was nothing for Dorothy to say in reply....

She knew that Stan, in the dining-room, was waiting to come to bed, but he must wait; Dorothy had the fire to mend, and Amory's cold hands to chafe, and to get her something hot to drink, and a dozen other things to do that had never had a beginning either, yet there they were, mere helpful habit and nothing more. Presently she set a cup of hot soup to Amory's lips.

"Drink this," she said, "and when you're rested my husband will take you home."

But that did not happen either. Amory spoke very tiredly.

"I should like—I don't want to trouble you—anywhere would do—but I don't want to go home to-night——"

Dorothy made a swift and doubting mental calculation. Where could she put her?——

"I'm simply done up," muttered Amory closing her eyes.

"I'm afraid we could only give you a shakedown in the dining-room——"

"Yes—that would do——"

Dorothy went out to give Stan his orders. Stan swore. "Rather cool, one of that crew coming here, to-night of all nights!" But Dorothy was peremptory.

"It isn't cool at all. You don't know anything about it. You'll find blankets in the chest in your dressing-room, and mind you don't wake Noel. Then get some cushions—I'll air a pillowcase—and then you must go up there and tell them where she is—they'll be anxious——"

"Shall I bring those twins of hers back with me while I'm about it?" Stan asked satirically. "May as well put the lot up."

When he heard Dorothy's reply he thought that his wife really had gone mad.

"I've arranged that," she said. "We shall be putting the twins up for a time at Ludlow by and by while she and her husband go away somewhere for a change. It's the least we can do. Don't stand gaping there, Stan——"

"Hm! May I ask what's up?"

"You may if you like, but I shan't tell you."

"Hm!... Well—it's a dog's life—but I suppose it's no good my saying anything——"

"Not a bit."

So Amory was put to bed, most unhygienically, in Dorothy's dining-room; but in the middle of the night she woke, quite unable to remember where she was. There was a narrow opening between the drawn curtains; through it a glimmer of light shone on the Venetian blinds from the street-lamp outside; and without any other light Amory got out of her improvised couch. She felt her way along the wall to a switch, and then suddenly flooded the room with light.

Blinking, she looked around. She herself wore one of Dorothy's nightgowns. On Stan's armchair, near his pipe-rack, was her hat, and her clothing lay in a heap where she had stepped out of it. Dorothy's slippers lay by the fender, and Dorothy had been too occupied to remember to remove the photograph of Uncle Ben from the mantelpiece. It seemed to be watching Amory as she stood, only half awake, in her borrowed nightgown.

It was odd, the way things came about——

If you had asked Amory at six o'clock the evening before where she intended to spend the night, she would not have replied "In Dorothy Tasker's flat——"

But she felt frightfully listless, and the improvised bed was very warm——

She switched off the light and crept back.