I

When, in the October of 1896, Louie Causton left Mortlake Road, with half the nurses of the home waving their handkerchiefs after her, she went to a house near the Parson's Green end of Wandsworth Bridge Road. As she left that house before Christmas, going to another one near the Walham Green Town Hall, there is no need to describe it. Neither need the Walham Green house be described, since from there she went, in February 1897, to yet another house, in a street off the Bishops Road, Fulham. These and other removals did not necessitate the use of a pantechnicon; a four-wheeler sufficed on each occasion. Louie, the boy and the nurse went inside; the top was quite big enough for her belongings. She stuck to the south-western district; at no time did she move farther east than when she took two rooms in Cheyne Walk, over a bicycle shop near the Chelsea suspension bridge—which rooms, by the way, she was forced to leave at an hour's notice, her landlord, a man of straw, being himself ejected and involving his sub-tenant in his own catastrophe. She kept to this district because of its nearness to Kingston and the Molyneux Arms. By the time the boy was nine months old she was living in Tadema Road, not far from where the Chelsea power-station now stands.

The nurse whom she had engaged was a link—save for Chaff the only one—with Trant. She was, indeed, her own old French governess, once CÉleste Martin, now CÉleste Farnier and a widow. She was a ProvenÇale, from Arles. On the death of her husband, which had taken place while Louie had been still at the home in Mortlake Road, she had sought out Chaff with a sheaf of testimonials, and by-and-by Louie had engaged her. She paid her ten shillings a week, on the distinct understanding that she must not hesitate to accept the first decent post that offered. It was already plain that, even if CÉleste could have brought herself to leave the little girl to whom she had taught the order of the personal pronouns in French, her affection for Master Jim would have haled her back again.

Louie changed her abode so frequently for one reason and another. In perhaps a third of the cases the landladies to whom she offered herself as a lodger found reasons for asking her to leave when they saw that her letters were addressed to "Miss Causton." Then, to save cab fares, Louie began to make her position plain at the outset. Sometimes this made a difference, sometimes none. On the whole, London S.W. showed itself charitable or merely indifferent. By May 1897 she was at another house in Wandsworth Bridge Road.

She had not refused to accept, easily and as a loan, a sum of money from Buck; but thrice she had well-nigh quarrelled with Buck because she would accept it only as a loan. Twice, for the same reason, she had had tussles with Chaff. But money, until she should find something settled to do, she must have. No doubt Richenda Earle would have shaken her head and have pointed out that now Louie not only had the Scarisbricks behind her, but a prosperous publican also; but Louie, though she lived as frugally as if she had to earn every penny, did not see why her boy should go short while there was money to be had. She took the sensible view of the matter, and borrowed, while walking her shoes out and answering advertisements for this, that and the other.

Up to the summer of '97 her occupations had been almost as various as her addresses. She very soon discovered that her Holborn training was of little use to her, and she could not (as also she discovered) play the piano well enough to give lessons. What she dreamed of, of course, was a comfortable private secretaryship; no young woman is so ill-trained or so incompetent but she fancies herself good enough for a private secretaryship. Perhaps Uncle Augustus might have helped her to one, but she would have nothing to do with Uncle Augustus; and Chaff was unable to beat up anything of the kind. Buck's proposal, that she should keep his books, had been the cause of their second altercation. Common-sense in the matter of borrowing she was prepared to be; beyond that point she remembered her pride and Richenda's words. So for the present she was spared the worst of the pinch.

So, in the early part of that year, she was in an A.B.C. cash-desk, traveller for a History, and saleswoman at an Earls Court chocolate-stall. Then, in June, she obtained, actually in the face of considerable competition, a place in the showrooms of a Bond Street photographer. Perhaps her dresses, of which several still remained, helped her to this place. She wrote letters, arranged appointments, answered press and other calls on the telephone, and received sitters. No doubt some of these knew Uncle Augustus. Robson, of the Board of Trade (who came one day), would probably know him; so would George Hastie, Robson's friend and colleague, and perhaps Sir Peregrine Campbell and others. Some of them, the more sporting sort, might even know Buck too, for Buck was still a tradition; in short, Louie's own position amused her immensely. By taking her letters home with her and leaving a younger assistant in charge, she was frequently able to leave the showrooms by half-past four and to spend the evenings with CÉleste and her boy. Incidentally, Louie improved her French a good deal, for CÉleste crooned over the boy in French and English indifferently.... "The darleeng—the lo-ove—the prÉcieux—oh, oh, oh, mais il existe—il manifeste, le petiot——"; and she would break off to sing, in a cracked voice, "Le Pont d'Avignon," or some lullaby of FrÉdÉric Mistral. She idolised the infant; when he was put to bed she did not delay long to follow him, for Louie, who had her work to do during the day, must not be roused at night; and so Louie frequently sat alone, writing her letters or wrapped in her own musings. She received thirty-five shillings a week. Her job had the appearance of a "permanency." In July she got a "rise" of three shillings a week. She also got ten days' holiday, the greater part of which she spent in the company of her father. She was beginning to know what holidays meant now.

On one of those days she had an unexpected little meeting in Richmond Park. CÉleste and the boy had gone on by train, and she was walking. The meeting was with a girl called Myrtle Morris, who, when Louie had kept the confectionery stall at Earls Court, had sold cigarettes at the stall adjoining. Miss Morris was accompanied by a tall young man; she stopped to greet Louie, and the young man walked slowly on. Myrtle asked Louie what she was doing now. Louie told her. "And you?" she said.

"Oh, I've gone back to my old trade," the girl said, nodding towards her retreating companion. "Artists' model. That's my present employer—Izzard."

"Who?" said Louie. The name seemed familiar.

"Billy Izzard. Know him?"

"No," said Louie. But she remembered now where she had heard the name.

"Jolly clever painter," said the model authoritatively. "Nice fellow too. Shall I call him?"

"Thanks, but I must be getting on," said Louie. "Good-bye."

"So long. Come and look me up some time, won't you? 25 Edith Grove."

"Thank you. Good-bye."

So that was Roy's friend! They had not gone down with the yacht that had lain under the hill at Rainham Parva. But she had only seen Mr. Izzard's back. For a moment, but only for a moment, she thought of Roy; then the sum-total of a long sequence of reveries returned to her again.

Or rather, the factors that made that total returned. In spite of her broodings late at night, when her letters were written and Jimmy's food prepared for the night, she was still unable to cast them up. Had she been asked to state her relation now to Mr. Jeffries her attempt would have been something like this:

"It's perfectly absurd, of course. There is no relation—nothing that can properly be called a relation. How can there be, with a man I don't see—haven't seen since that queer party? I don't even know where he is or what he's doing; he may be a commissionaire again for all I know."

"Yes, but," she now answered herself, as if it had been some form of a dialogue, "don't forget that other night, at Mortlake Road, after Kitty'd gone."

She did not forget that night. She had told herself that night that it was nonsense that she should love Mr. Jeffries. Again she answered that critical objector within herself.

"But it is nonsense after all! How can I? I suppose I mean that if things had been different I might have loved him. Moping about a man you never see is all very well for a schoolgirl for a week or two, but not for grown women, and mothers at that."

"Then you mean he's just the same to you as Buck and Chaff?" the dialogue continued, as she walked.

"All I mean is that he might have been more."

"Well, suppose you were to hear now that he'd broken off with Kitty, and—you know—that other were to happen?"

She did know what she meant by "that other." It was the most familiar of her thoughts. It was what in her heart she was stilly waiting for—to learn one day that Mr. Jeffries had broken off with Kitty and had become engaged to Evie Soames. And at that point she always tried to stop the dialogue. Beyond that point lay something that she vaguely apprehended might be horrible.

She had no definite reason for supposing this horrible thing to exist. The horror, indeed, was that it might exist, and to entertain morbid thoughts about something that merely might exist was neither pleasant nor wise. But at times she could not forget the promise she had once made to herself—that if anything unaccountable ever happened to a certain young man she would know in what quarter to look for the likely cause of it. And something had happened. Part of what had happened she had had from Miss Cora; "A lethal chamber—the nasty little sewer-rat!" Miss Cora had said; and it had happened on the eve of his wedding to Evie Soames. To commit suicide had been the only thing to do.

And of course he had committed suicide....

Then that second voice within her tried to speak again. "Remember," it said, "that this Mr. Jeffries, of whom you can't help thinking when all's said and done, had suffered innumerable insults from him—you yourself were dragged into one of them——"

"Quiet!" the other self commanded peremptorily.

"—and as far as that girl you hate's concerned—Evie Soames—if the reason was good enough for suicide it was good enough for the other thing."

"What other thing?" Louie, in spite of herself, could not help asking.

"Oh—you know!"

"Do you know what you're saying?" This was an attempt to browbeat the other Louie.

"Oh, perfectly well! I know myself—you—us—Louie Causton—better than you do! And I know that lion better! Have you forgotten? Don't you remember what you thought of him, that if he set his mind on a thing he'd get it sooner or later, one way or another? Don't you remember what he said—'I wonder if anybody's ever beaten who doesn't deserve to be?' They are dangerous men who believe that! And the way's clear for him now, isn't it? Of course it is! Why, suppose you hear, first, that he's thrown Kitty Windus over; suppose you hear, next, that he's forging ahead in his business, whatever it is—you know he's as ambitious as Satan; then suppose you hear that he's engaged to Evie Soames—married to her. Suppose you hear all this?"

"Oh, anybody can make up an a priori tale like that!" the other scoffed.

"Perhaps they can; but what is a murder anyway? Whoever sees one committed? Don't they hang men on just such a priori tales, as you call it? Suppose that, rather than let him marry that girl——"

"Oh, stop, stop!" Louie positively shrieked within herself.

She was white. This scene always turned her white. She quickened her pace, but her ghastly pallor remained unchanged. A hundred times she had argued it all before, and she knew the conclusion that would presently come.

It came, the conclusion. That portion of herself that always seemed resolved to convict Mr. Jeffries of a hideous thing spoke, as it were, softly, seductively.

"And what then, Louie? What then? Come, don't be afraid of yourself! You know it in your heart all the time! Roy—you remember—you had to make the love there; and you want to be made love to, not to make love. You didn't find Mr. Jeffries a butt and a laughing-stock, you know. You envied that little chit of a milliner's hand—envied her and hated her. And she hates you, and always will, because you caught her in the dark with that other creature. Yes, yes, I know you were overstrung at that time, and didn't see yourself very clearly, but look at the thing now—you're calm now. When you saw his eyes, all full of perils and stratagems and deceits, all for her sake, you know you longed to have a man do all that for you! And when he did that mad thing with Kitty Windus, you know you wanted a man who would go even to those lengths for you! And you know that when he throws her over—brutally, heartlessly, without conscience—you'll want a man who'll be just as brutal and heartless and conscienceless for you! You all want it! You all love a ruthless man! You know it's the men who are the merciful sex when sex comes into the question; you're only merciful when it doesn't—just as those stupid men are merciless about the abstractions you don't care a straw about!... So suppose—suppose——"

"Oh, stop!" Louie besought herself faintly.

"—suppose it turns out as I say! Won't you immediately love him a little more when poor Kitty's sent about her business? And won't you love him a little more still when you hear he's engaged to Evie Soames? And won't you, when you learn that he's been willing to go all lengths—all lengths—for love, love him past all mending? You will, you will, you know you will!" The cry rang out almost exultantly.

"But—but—those people—coroners' juries—are supposed to know all about these things."

"Coroners' juries!... Do you remember his eyes?..."

Beyond that point Louie never got. She usually rose quickly and went out to post the photographer's letters. There, then, were the elements of her sum. Sometimes some of them presented themselves, sometimes others; more and more she shrank from casting the total. And often, to shake off the hideous, fascinating obsession, she did the most trivial thing she could think of—went to a drawer and overhauled her dresses, selecting the one she would wear at the photographer's showroom on the morrow.

It was in her to turn from the thought of a possible murder to the shaking out of a crumpled dress.

But she never wore the oyster-grey at the showrooms in Bond Street. Nevertheless she shook it out frequently, putting it back into the drawer again.

That day, at the Molyneux Arms, Buck was alternately at his fondest and at his most tyrannical. The fondness was for Louie and the boy, the tyranny for everybody else. As Louie entered the little private parlour (she was not allowed to set foot in the rest of the premises) she heard loud crowings; they came from Jimmy, and were for the Pilgrim of Love who held him up at arm's-length in the air; but the next moment Buck was scolding a barmaid who had had the temerity to borrow the current number of Modern Society before Louie had seen it. "Not that I don't make 'em all read it," he said, "but at times and seasons, and in their proper places; what with all these Radicals and what not we don't want chayoss coming again! You bring it back this minute, miss!—'Oryn—thia my BelovÈd!"

Buck kept his divided humour through tea; then there was another outburst. This time it was about a letter that had not been given to Louie immediately.

"And how do you know that it isn't important?" he broke out on his wife. "Not a word—not a word! I know it is important—all letters addressed so are important, mind, for the future! Those letters aren't about the butcher and baker and candlestick-maker, I'll have you know! Give it to her at once, and let Madermoselle hook up the back, or your next dress shall fasten down the front, I promise you!... What, little man! A granddad, eh? 'No re-(h)-est—but the gra-(h)-ave——'"

For all Louie was able to guess from the signature, her letter might have been from butcher, baker and candlestick-maker, all three; the name—"hers to serve, Frank Hickley"—was unknown to her. But the single other name that the letter contained was known. It was that of Kitty Windus. She was laid up somewhere in Vauxhall, and wanted to see her.

The next morning, in a shabby respectable street off the Vauxhall Bridge Road, Louie rang a bell beneath which, punched in a strip of aluminium, was the sign, "F. Hickley, Agent." F. Hickley himself opened the door. Later Louie learned that he was an agent for his wife's shopping, boot-cleaning and potato-peeling. Mrs. Hickley was Kitty's cousin, but the bit she had coming in was not enough to relieve her of the necessity of keeping a lodging-house. That it was a lodging-house Louie guessed from the number and variety of hats and coats that hung in the narrow yellow-painted hall. Mrs. Hickley appeared from somewhere below; Mr. Hickley, descending again, passed her on the stairs.

"Are you Miss Causton?" Mrs. Hickley asked.

"Yes. I've had a letter saying Miss Windus was here."

"Will you come up? Don't take too much notice of her, what she says, especially about tracts; Uncle Arthur's side's liable to it. This way."

"Is she ill?" Louie asked.

"Not to call ill. She'll go to Margate in a week or two, for the air, though Margate's too strong for me; Littlehampton's my favourite. And Bognor. Mind the stair-rod—I must tell Frank to fasten it down."

As Kitty had formerly found Louie, so Louie now found Kitty—in bed. Her muteness as long as Mrs. Hickley remained in the room seemed obstinate, voulu; the rapid speech into which she broke without preface when her cousin's step had ceased to sound on the stairs confirmed some vague impression of secretiveness. Louie was uneasy at the change in her.

"You're not to talk about it," Kitty said, the words falling one over the other; "that's what the doctor meant, though of course he didn't know what it was. And Mr. Folliott too—the Reverend Mr. Folliott of St. Peters. He gave me the address in Cliftonville, quite the best end of the town; there's such a lot in a good address, don't you think? You know Margate?"

"How are you, dear?" said Louie gently. "Yes, your cousin told me you were going away for a bit."

"Right away," said Kitty. "I can, you see; I haven't got to work if I don't want to; though I'm not rich, of course. Neither is Annie, but I don't like to see men doing the housework like Cousin Frank for all that. I've told Frank so again and again. 'Be an agent,' I've said time after time; 'for typewriters, or mangles, or tea, or anything you like, but get out of the house; it isn't a man's place.' And it isn't.... You've heard?" she broke off suddenly to say.

She blinked at Louie. Her neck above her nightgown was hardly more substantial than that of a chicken; her hands seemed to have become as veined as a skeleton leaf. Louie took one of them.

"Always running errands and setting the table—it isn't a man's life," Kitty continued. "'What does agent mean?' I said to him. 'Pull yourself together and make it mean something, Frank!' I said. 'You're not very big, but you're strong, and you've got your wits about you,' I said.... You've heard?" she demanded once more.

"Well, tell me how you are," said Louie, patting the thin hand soothingly.

"But have you heard the news? Glad tidings for all. 'Come unto Me, and I will give you rest'—that's what we all want—rest; though why they should print 'Come' in red and 'unto' in green and 'Me' in purple, and all the letters like twigs, I'm sure I can't tell you, my dear. And always Oxford frames. I must ask Mr. Folliott. 'Though your sins be as crimson——'"

"You haven't asked how my little boy is, Kitty," said Louie.

"'Suffer the little children, and forbid them not'—how is he?"

But she did not wait for an answer. She was off again—the doctor, the Reverend Mr. Folliott, her approaching visit to Margate. And always she returned to the indignity of a man's doing women's work about the house. It was in this connection that she suddenly mentioned, in a way that gave Louie a slight start, the name of Mr. Jeffries.

"I will at least say that for him," she prattled; "I shouldn't have got sick of the sight of him; out of the house at half-past nine he'd have been, and that would have been the end of him till six o'clock; not always bumping into you like Frank. I suppose you know Miss Levey's there too, at his Company? He's getting on there like anything. So's Mr. Mackie; you remember Mr. Mackie? He takes the auction himself now on Mondays and Thursdays; in Oxford Street; everybody stops as they walk past; he's a caution, is Mr. Mackie, I can tell you! But of course Jeff"—here she became mysterious, and nodded once or twice—"Jeff's on the way up—up. It's a different class of work from Mr. Mackie's; better, as you might say; he's in the Confidential Exchange Department, Miriam says——"

"How is Miss Levey?" Louie asked, at a loss what else to say.

"Oh, in the pink—but the soul's the chief thing; what shall it profit a man; and I don't know whether her soul's in the pink. Do you always hold with the Church of England, Louie?" she asked earnestly.

There was nothing to be made of her. She ran on weakly, irresponsibly, from trifle to trifle, and it was at Louie's own risk that she gave her talk any significance at all.... Suddenly she insisted that she herself had broken the engagement, not he. She spoke of his place in the Company—it was the Freight and Ballast Company; it appeared to be a "permanency." He was getting on—on; he wouldn't polish brasses and take the lodgers' boots to be mended!... As she talked, Louie looked round the poor, neat little bedroom. It had framed texts and a picture of a lady shipwrecked in a nightgown; this was entitled "Simply to Thy Cross I cling." There was a good deal of muslin about, tied back with flyblown bows.

But suddenly Kitty seemed to remember something. Louie was once more gently patting the hand on the counterpane when she gave a quick little clutch and sat up.

"They wrote to you to come, didn't they?" she asked, looking hard at Louie.

"Yes, dear. I'd have come sooner if I'd known. The letter was sent on from Mortlake Road. I came as soon as I got it."

"That's all right," said Kitty, nodding mysteriously again. "I want to talk to you. Is the door shut?"

"Yes; but don't talk. Let me talk to you instead."

"No; there's something I want to say, and I shall forget it if I don't say it now.... You heard about it, didn't you? I don't mean the glad tidings for all——"

"Lie down, dear." (Kitty was squatting up in bed.) "Tell me the next time I come. I'll come again."

"No, I must tell you now. Though Jeff's sins be as scarlet. Of course you heard about Archie?"

"Hush."

"Of course you'd be down on him; quite right; so was Jeff. Jeff didn't half give him a talking to, I can tell you! 'Oh, I'll give him a dressing down,' he said; he was pretending it wasn't much, so as not to alarm me; but I know him! 'Miss Causton and me?' he said. 'What a ridiculous idea!' And he made Archie apologise before the whole school. And now Archie's gone, and they said it was suicide; but what I can't understand is about Jeff's having that black eye, that very day. He'd fallen when he was drunk, he said, but Jeff never got drunk. He said he tripped on the step; but he never got drunk, if you understand what I mean. Wine is a mocker, isn't it, Louie? But I'm sure Jeff wasn't drunk. He isn't that kind of man."

Louie herself wondered why she should interpose as quickly and peremptorily as she did. She wondered, too, why she should do so in the words she used and in a voice so thin and harsh.

"Oh—of course he was drunk! My father keeps a public-house, so I ought to know. And they often get black eyes when they're drunk. Let's talk about something else."

"Well," said Kitty, with her head on one side, "a public-house is as paying a business as there is, especially in a poor neighbourhood. But I'd rather have my little bit in tramways. People ought to be careful how they invest their money; dividends aren't everything; what shall it profit a man? So you think I needn't worry about Jeff's black eye?"

All at once Louie felt an almost hysterical need to turn Kitty's weak wanderings into another direction—any other direction. Glibly she began to improvise.

"It's horrid," she said, her voice a little raised. "I've seen them at my father's. They get drunk, and fall, and then they get black eyes quite easily. And," she ran on regardlessly, "they knock themselves about fearfully! I saw a man in the Harrow Road one night——"

Feverishly she extemporised. To something she had once seen from the top of a bus she gave colour and circumstance. Kitty was impressed. "Dear me!" she said.

Then, when the danger, whatever it was, seemed to be averted, Louie turned, though not much more calmly, to Margate. Kitty was perfectly docile; Margate or that dangerous other were all the same to her. Louie had never been to Margate, but she compared Margate with other places—Bournemouth, Ilfracombe, Scarboro.

"I should like to go to Scarboro," Kitty mused—"Harrogate too—Harrogate's tremendously toney, isn't it?"

"Very; all hotels and kursaals and pump rooms and things," averred Louie, who had never been to Harrogate either.

Then, ten minutes later, she rose. She said good-bye. But even as she did so she received another start. Kitty had suddenly called in a sharp, loud voice.

"Was that Annie at the door?"

"No," said Louie, her nerves all on edge. "There's nobody."

"Open the door and look!"

Louie did so. There was nobody. She returned to the bed again. Kitty was once more squatting up. She still spoke sharply.

"It's all very well to be so cocksure," she said, "but if Annie was to guess, or Miriam Levey or any of them, it would be all U P, I can tell you! Or Evie Soames either! I only told you because you're different and can hold your tongue! The tongue is a little member, so the best thing people can do is to shut up, you take my tip! And I broke it off, mind you! There's as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it, without girls making themselves cheap, and if he ever wants to know I'll tell him straight—no drunks and black eyes for me! Not that I don't forgive my enemies; I'm as good at that as the next one; but when I'm engaged again it'll be to somebody who's TT absolutely, though he does clean the knives!" Then, dropping her voice again, she said equably: "Good-bye, dear—you will come again, won't you? I sha'n't be going for a fortnight—the rooms aren't at liberty yet—there isn't a sea view, but it isn't a minute from the Ramsgate tram—you must come and stay with me——"

Louie left her. Downstairs in the hall she had a few words with Kitty's cousin. She asked when the engagement with Mr. Jeffries had been broken off, and was told a year ago. Part of the time since then Kitty had spent with another cousin, Alf Windus, who lived in Kilburn and played the first fiddle at the Metropolitan in Edgware Road; part she had spent at Alf's sister-in-law's at Wealdstone; and for the rest of the time she had been at the Hickleys'. She was only a little flighty at times, and Mrs. Hickley was too busy, what with breakfasts at different hours and some liking one thing and some another, to pay much attention to her. She would have taken her for nothing if she could, but life was a struggle and business was business, and Mrs. Hickley had been lucky enough to let her room for the time she would be away at Margate. If Kitty really had anything to keep from her cousin, apparently (Louie concluded) she had kept it. Probably Kitty's condition (Mrs. Hickley added) was a result of the shock of Archie Merridew's suicide, coinciding with her rupture with Mr. Jeffries. Beyond that Mrs. Hickley minded her own business—plenty, too,——

"Thank you for coming," she said, opening the door for Louie.

"I shall come again if I may," Louie replied.

Already she knew that she would go again—must go again—though it was only when she had left the house behind her that she began to ask herself why. Then followed another dialogue. The critical Louie began it.

"Well, what did I tell you? His engagement's off, and he's getting on in his business. I'm right so far, eh?"

"Too right," the other Louie muttered. "Let it rest."

"Will it let you rest—that's the question! Well, what do you want next—his engagement to Evie Soames?"

"I don't want anything. I've got my boy and my living to earn. That fills my life."

"Then why are you going to see Kitty again? Come, don't shirk it. You know why you're going. You're going to——"

"I'm not!"

"You're going to protect him! If that poor creature thinks she guesses, you're going to tell her the notion's perfectly absurd! You're going to lie to her! If she has weak fancies, you're going to see that they're just as wide of the truth as they can be. Do you still deny what the truth is? After whatever the tale is he's been telling about drunkenness and a black eye? Is he that kind of man? Isn't that just as likely as not to be one of his blinds? A man has to be cunning, you know, to hoodwink a coroner's jury, but somehow he seems to have done it."

"I don't know anything about it."

"You mean you believe he hasn't done it? Then why are you going to see Kitty again? Oh, don't pretend to me! I tell you you're going to protect him. And why are you going to protect him? (Ah, I didn't think of that before, but I see it now!) You'll love him a little more still just for that! You'll love him because you have his safety in your hands. You'll keep it in your hands. Even if you have to take Kitty to live with you, so that you can watch her every spare moment, you'll take care she never, never knows. You're planning it now. You're going to have a right in that man no other woman on earth has, Evie Soames or anybody else. And you're going to take him from Evie Soames too, if you can!"

The other attempted irony. "What, me? With my story?"

"You only regret your story because it stands now in your way of getting him! Would you marry Roy now even if you could gain a kingdom by it? Why, you wouldn't before, let alone now! What are you going to see Kitty again for—to-morrow? We shall see! Your nerves are all a-jump at this moment; you don't feel it safe to leave here even for a few hours! And another thing. Miriam Levey seems to be at his place, wherever it is, and you're positively trembling about that! While you're trying to worm things out of Kitty on the one side, she'll be at the other—you know what she is! So the first thing you'll do will be to find out exactly what Kitty's got into her head."

But here the normal Louie temporarily triumphed. "What a tale you're making up!" she laughed. "These things simply do not happen. Actually, you're trying to force it on me that I love a man simply because he's committed a——"

"Not simply because——"

"Well, that I'm in love with a man who has committed one. Tell that to the world, and see how you're laughed at!... Oh no, it's too much. People don't do it, especially when it's guesswork, pure and simple——"

So she triumphed. The other Louie held her peace.

But for all that she went to see Kitty again on the morrow.

II

It was an error of judgment that caused Louie to leave the photographer's in Bond Street. The money she owed to Buck and Chaff was on her mind; she saw that Richenda Earle had been right; she was not yet out in the open. She sought to diminish her indebtedness by finding a better-paid post.

The opportunity presented itself. She obtained, at a salary of three pounds a week, the coveted secretaryship. Never mind to whom she became secretary; he is now a renowned author; and Louie was with him for just a fortnight. At the end of that time he offered to double her salary. Louie's answer was to walk immediately out of his house. She had now no job at all.

The story of the pinch shall be passed over lightly. The boy did not feel it; it was she who tightened her belt. Promising herself that it was for the last time, she borrowed of Buck, and then removed to Edith Grove, taking two small rooms in the same house as Myrtle Morris, the model. But Myrtle had gone for the Christmas season into pantomime, and as Louie was out all day, and asleep when Myrtle returned at night, she saw little of her. She would have gone into pantomime too, but she was too late, and still hoped for something better. Of necessity CÉleste remained with her; CÉleste kept the place going with her needle. This was at the beginning of 1898. February found her again in a cash-desk, this time at Slater's. The desk had a mirrored panel in the front of it that extended from the narrow counter to the floor, and at first Louie wondered why clerks and shop-assistants put down their money, stood back from the desk, and grinned. Then one day, when somebody else was inside the box, she noticed the illusion. The head and shoulders of the girl in the cage appeared to be continued downwards by the trousers of a man. As she could not afford to throw up her job, she continued to bear the grins disdainfully. After her day's work she acquired from CÉleste the art of crochet. Her mats and table-centres and borders for teacloths went in with CÉleste's own work.

Her improved French enabled her to pass, in April, from the cash-desk at Slater's to one at a foreign restaurant in Soho. She still lived in Edith Grove. For several weeks that summer she was again at Earls Court, but with the reopening of the theatres she obtained a place in the ladies' cloakroom at His Majesty's. One night she helped Miss Elwell, the daughter of Sir James Elwell of the Treasury, off with her cloak. She was unrecognised. She wondered how B. Minor was getting on.

She was still at His Majesty's at Christmas 1898; but the New Year saw her at still another place—a Ladies' Turkish Baths, in St. James's. Buck, angry and disapproving of the whole course of her life, liked this least of all; massage somehow brought it home to him. But there was a worse shock still in store for Buck. In the spring of '99 Louie became an artist's model.

Myrtle Morris introduced her to the profession and to Roy's friend, Billy Izzard, at the same time. This also was in Edith Grove. Billy Izzard, whose large, boyish face and loose, shambling figure somehow gave Louie the impression that he had either grown too quickly or else not yet filled out, was telling Miss Morris, with a candour entirely disarming, that for some purpose or other her own form was no good at all; and Miss Morris asked him why he didn't try the Models' Club. He snorted.

"Try it? I have tried it; tried everything. Fact of the matter is, it's like going to a Registry Office for servants; you find the rich people have snapped up all the best before they get there. Old Henson gets 'em. He's got the very girl I want; Miss Gale; but I can't pay what Henson pays. And the rest of you are like that egg—good in parts."

Louie wondered whether Billy had ever heard her name before; she found a way of making sure. The talk turned to holiday-places for the coming summer, and Louie contrived to mention the Somerset coast and the Bristol Channel. The unsuspecting Billy told her that he had once been yachting there with a fellow and had had a smash-up. It was amusing. According to Billy, the other fellow had rather fancied himself as a patcher-up of broken centre-boards and suchlike, had put in at some place or other, and had said he'd made the centre-board all right; and he'd come pretty near drowning the pair of them off a place called Combe Martin. Luckily they'd been spied by the coastguard, and a boat had been put out to them. "Rottenest piece of navigation in England," Billy grumbled on; "there's a place called the Boiling Pot——" He described it....

Louie felt a little gush of gratitude towards Roy. He had not chattered. But of course he would not——

She did not offer at once to sit to Billy; it was a fortnight later that she screwed up her courage to do so. During that time she thought the matter out. Perhaps the stark simplicity of the thing attracted her. No acquirement she was ever likely to possess would greatly improve her circumstances; it would probably be the same to the end of the chapter—cash-desk, waitress, Earls Court—Earls Court, mannequin, and a private secretaryship with an offer of double wages. At two colleges she had learned little or nothing; she lacked application; but here was something that quietly brushed acquirements aside—something that went flagrantly by favour. It was femininity reduced to its simplest statement. She had no fear of Billy Izzard. She guessed that to him she would be little more than a more complex whitewashed cube or cone or pyramid.

She did not even colour when she made her proposal to him....

"But I expect you'll go off to old Henson or some other swell presently," he sighed, as she stood before him....

And of course Chaff, barring her face that was best suited with a large shady hat, had given her her testimonial long before.

Buck was furious. The original, genuine Pilgrim of Love had reason enough to know what happened in studios. Young women of high birth (in Louie's case it would probably be a young man) began to take their lunches there, and one day burst into jealous unhappy tears, and after that the Pilgrimage began. But Louie only laughed at him. She reminded him that she had reason to regard herself as a pilgrim too. At that Buck looked hard at her.

"Little woman," he said slowly, "d'you mean—that there is somebody?" Louie laughed again, but more consciously.

"Once or twice lately," Buck continued, still looking hard at her, "I've wondered whether there might be——"

"How can there be, daddy?"

"Well, the other isn't befitting," said Buck, shaking his head and returning to the original point.

"My daddy did it."

"Ah, men's different. For high ladies it—it isn't befitting."

"I'm not a young girl, daddy."

"No." Buck sighed. If he had only known her when she was a young girl! But the whims of the Scarisbricks were still the Scarisbricks' whims, and as such above his judgment. "But I want to see this Mr. Izzard," he added grimly.

"That you certainly sha'n't," Louie replied promptly. "Fancy your taking me round everywhere I go!"

"Everywhere?" Buck repeated, alarmed anew.

"Of course. If it's a business it's a business. Why, Mr. Izzard alone would be—dreadful! It's no good, daddy; you can't change my mind."

He saw that he could not, but he still tried. It only delayed a little her carrying of her point. In the end—well, she was her mother's daughter. There was no more to be said.

So she began to make the round of the Chelsea studios, and presently moved, with CÉleste and the boy, to more comfortable quarters in Lavender Hill, Clapham Junction. This took her farther from her work in Chelsea, but brought her nearer to the Lambeth and Westminster Schools of Art, where also she obtained sittings, sometimes during the day, sometimes in the evenings also. She sat for Billy when Billy could afford to pay her. "No, no—no tick, Billy," she told him once; "I don't do this for amusement." Of the boy Billy knew nothing.... Buck, still strongly averse from the whole proceeding, at first refused to hear her gossip of the day's work; but, as his silence did not alter matters, little by little he began to come round. Soon they exchanged experiences quite freely. He told her what Sopley had said about his deltoid, Henson about his thigh. "You vain old daddy!" she said, stroking his cheek, "I believe for two pins you'd do it again!" She took a pleasure in fondly shocking him in the same sort. Sometimes he mused long. You will admit that it was something to muse over. And so—well, so Louie, throwing acquirements aside with her clothes, became, by virtue of her peculiar commodity, economically emancipated. As female models, women are eminently better than men.

She did fairly well at it. So well did she do that from the three rooms in Lavender Hill (the third one CÉleste's) piece by piece her landlady's furniture began to disappear. Her own took its place. She intended, when she had enough of her own, to save the difference in rent between furnished and unfurnished quarters by taking a small flat. So her two chests of drawers and her wardrobe were her own; so were much of her cutlery and bed and table linen; and so, of course, were Jimmy's various paraphernalia. But she was not ready to leave yet. The summer of 1900, she thought, would be early enough.

And in one particular at least she was now able to hold up her head. She still owed money both to Buck and Chaff, but she knew as much about the struggle for a livelihood as Richenda Earle herself. And she had not grizzled. Life had not knocked her out. She was her father's daughter after all.

And yet, once more, she felt herself her mother's daughter too. The reason, which was not very far to seek, was this:

The earlier stages of that furtive romance that in the end had left her former husband no Rest but the Grave were known only to Mrs. Chaffinger herself. Henson had not guessed them; Lord Moone had seen only the resultant scandal of them. But Louie understood a little now. She could at least guess what had happened to her mother between her first setting eyes on the splendid Buck and that final petulant, pathetic cry: "Oh, that I should have to beg a man to marry me!" By sympathy she was able now to divine the sighs, the half-acknowledged longings, the half-shamed daydreams, the revulsions, the sinkings back again. For Louie now knew something of these things within herself.

Not that there was not harder stuff in Louie. There was. There was, for example, that sense of proportion which is humour. How could her thoughts of Mr. Jeffries not be rather preposterous? She found it difficult sometimes to remember even his personal appearance; she had well-nigh forgotten his voice; many idle repetitions had dulled the memory of that odd little thrill she had felt when her hand had lain in his. True, she remembered these things in a way. She remembered the tawny bulk of him, the lion's eyes, the gloss of his hair, the modeless fashion of his speech; but these were mere noted facts, no more hers than everybody else's. Yet what (she asked herself) had become of her sense of humour that she should want something of him that nobody else had? What had happened to her sense of proportion that she did not forget him as she had forgotten scores of people of whom she had seen far, far more? And how had it come about that, for one thought she cast on Roy, Mr. Jeffries had twenty? And why this new and curious understanding of her mother?

She asked herself these questions behind the grilles of her cash-desks, behind the counters of her Earls Court stalls, posing or crocheting on her model thrones, riding backwards and forwards to her sittings or what not on the tops of omnibuses. Usually she answered herself more or less like this:

"It looks very much as if I was making of him what he seems to have made of that Soames girl—a sort of idÉe fixe; if I were to fall really in love now, I suppose I shouldn't think any more about him. Luckily it doesn't matter; it's my own affair. Good gracious, suppose he knew! He'd think me as imbecile as I am!—There I go again!" (This probably, some minutes later.) "Suppose I had met him earlier, and things had been different—what about it? What's the good of remembering all that now? Well, it puts the time on down this beastly Kennington Lane.... Thank goodness I'm not likely to come across him; I can't help thinking something would happen if I did.... Poor mother!" she usually ended inconsequentially, "I suppose she'd be about my age. I'm turned thirty—thirty-one in fact—shall have to stop counting soon. Time you stopped counting when it occurs to you that your mother had dreams just as silly as yours——"

And so, whether this Mr. Jeffries meant much or little to her, he did not mean so much but that any trivial near occurrence—a cold of young Jimmy's, a cold of her own that prevented her from sitting for a day or two, or a fall in the crochet-market—put Mr. Jeffries and the wild and tangled ideas that seemed to cloak his image temporarily quite out of her thoughts.

When early in the year 1900 she got regular sittings for a time with an artist who lived in St. John's Wood, she never went up or down Tottenham Court Road in the Victoria bus without half expecting to run across Evie Soames, who lived in Woburn Place. Because she did not meet her, she concluded that very likely she lived there no longer. But, late on a windy afternoon in March, at about the time when the street lamps were being lighted, she did meet her.

It was opposite the Adam and Eve, in Euston Road, and on either of the two women's parts there was a curious momentary hesitation. If Evie Soames still lived in Woburn Place and was going home, the first bus that came would do for her, and Louie had already seen her glance as it approached; but as it happened, that bus was the Victoria bus for which Louie herself was waiting. Louie spoke; it seemed to her that not to speak would be to apologise, by silence, for that episode in her career that had brought Kitty Windus in haste to the Nursing Home in Mortlake Road. A large parcel she was carrying gave her an excuse not to shake hands.

"How do you do?" she said.

Something, she could not have told what, had instantly drawn her eyes to the girl's attire. Evie Soames was wearing a black jacket and black fur cap, but the wind, turning the jacket aside, showed the narrow black and white stripes of the blouse beneath.

"Oh—fancy meeting you!" Evie said, turning her dark eyes as if she had only that moment seen Louie. There was something in her manner that Louie interpreted as meaning, "Very well, if I've got to be cordial I'll be cordial!" "Are you going by this bus?" she added.

"Yes."

"Oh! Where are you living now—Putney?"

It may be that Louie met any slight the last word might have conveyed half-way and more. She replied, a little shortly: "No, Lavender Hill; I change at Victoria. After you——"

"Oh no—after you!"

Louie ascended; they couldn't stand on the kerb discussing points of precedence. "Let's go in front," Evie said, "and then men won't smoke on us," and they settled down.

"Well," Evie said, adjusting the apron, "and how are you?"

"Thank you," said Louie, "perfectly well."

"There's room for your parcel here. Such ages since we met! Let me see, when was it?"

They discussed when it was, and then, "And have you seen Kitty Windus lately?" Evie asked.

Since her first visit to the Hickleys' Louie had seen Kitty perhaps half-a-dozen times in all, not oftener. Kitty had been to Margate, thence to Whetstone, and after that to Alf Windus the violinist's. Louie had simply not been able to see her oftener; she had had far too much to do. And, after all, nothing (the nothing of Louie's fears and fancies) seemed to have happened. Except to herself (Louie guessed) Kitty made no mysterious allusions to black eyes. She was merely puzzled, pathetic, harmless. She had not that perilous thing, a preconceived theory into which events had a fulfilling way of dropping of themselves. So Louie replied to Evie Soames in a tone as casual as her own:

"Oh yes, I've seen her several times. Of course you heard that her engagement to Mr. Jeffries was broken off?"

"Oh yes," said Evie, looking straight in front of her.

"Have you seen her, then?"

"Oh no. But of course Mr. Jeffries himself would know, wouldn't he?—that is, if you call it breaking off when a person just disappears without saying where she is or anything about it. Don't bother to unbutton; I have some pennies——"

But Louie also had pennies. "Any more fares?" the conductor called, and then went downstairs again. The two women fell into a silence. The early lamplight came and went on their faces as the bus jogged on.

Presently the silence seemed to have taken almost the character of a contest as to who should speak next, with either resolved that it should not be herself. Louie knew perfectly well what was the matter. Miss Soames might speak glancingly of Mortlake Road and offer to pay her bus fares, but really she hated Louie because of Louie's discovery in the old ledger-room on that examination day that now seemed so long ago. The girl seemed to be still in some sort of half mourning—but Louie did not want to think much of that and all that it might mean. Rather desperately, she strove to forget that she had ever had a theory about what might have driven Evie Soames into black and of what might happen when she went into colours again. She must, she told herself sharply, have a hideous mind ever to have thought these things. Indeed, she was so short with herself about it that, relinquishing the contest of silence, she again made the small immediate thing banish the large shadowy one behind.

"Do you ever see Miriam Levey nowadays?" she asked suddenly.

"No," Evie replied. At any rate she had not been the first to speak.

"Oh? But aren't she and Mr. Jeffries at the same place now?"

"Yes, I believe they are—in fact, I know they are. I suppose Kitty told you?"

"Yes."

"Poor Kitty! But let me see: was Miriam at the office when Kitty came to Mortlake Road? I thought it was after that she went."

"I've seen Kitty more than once," said Louie, compressing her lips. The bus was slowing down opposite the Oxford.

"Ah, yes, you said so. Well, remember me to her when you see her again, won't you? I get down here. I hope you'll get your parcel home all right; it's rather a large one, isn't it? Good-bye."

As Evie Soames's figure was lost in the crowd that jostled in the lights of the Horse Shoe Louie did not look round. She was too angry. "Good gracious!" she exclaimed, "the insupportable little creature! Why, I never looked at one of my mother's housemaids so! De haut en bas—her to me! But I did catch you that day, Miss Polly Ross, and you know it!"

But as the bus moved southwards again, she was trying once more to forget that white stripe in Evie Soames's dress. She did not want to think that anything had suddenly seemed to come a stride nearer. And she would now rather not have been told, what apparently was the fact, that, whether frequently or not, Evie Soames did see Mr. Jeffries.

The parcel she was taking home contained a dress; she had been sitting in it; but it was not the oyster-grey. The old oyster-grey, too, served to bring her nearer to her mother and that weak flicker of romance long ago in Henson's studio. Not for worlds would she have had CÉleste see the idiotic looks she sometimes gave that dress in which she had danced with Mr. Jeffries. And sometimes she would suddenly toss it aside, roughly, anyhow. She was not seventeen (she would tell herself), to moon over a flower a man had given her or a dance programme on which he had scrawled his name. She was a woman of turned thirty-one (she rubbed it in), with her living to earn and an illegitimate son to provide for.... But sometimes she was very wistful too. She had never (she sighed) really been a girl of seventeen at all; looking back, she saw that she had missed that. She blamed nobody; no doubt she had been unruly, ill-conditioned, unmanageable; still, she had missed that. The thought always sent her off into her reveries again; and then, how differently, how much more admirably, she was able to plan everything to herself! Over and over again she built it all up, unbuilt it again, rearranged it, played with it. Had she, as a girl of seventeen, met Mr. Jeffries—had this circumstance been different, that particular not been the same—had she nursed no grudge against her mother—had it been Mr. Jeffries, not Roy, with whom she had kicked her long legs during the vacations at Mallard Bois—had she, in a word, had the arranging of the world herself and the choosing of the places she and he were to occupy in it——

"Bosh!" she usually cut herself abruptly off. "I shall be afraid of turning a corner soon for fear of walking into the gentleman! What shall I take in for supper?"

She did not know yet—indeed it was only some months later that she learned it, but it is set down here—that already, at a Langham Exhibition, Billy Izzard had one day seen a big stranger standing before one of his sketches, had gone up and spoken to him, and had liked the fellow—had liked his hewn slab of a face with the yellow eyes in it so much that presently, having an old sketch he was never likely to sell, he had given it to him. But Billy would at any time rather give away a sketch to somebody he liked than sell one to somebody he didn't like, and he still set, moreover, less than their real value on those paintings of flowers that he "knocked off" in a couple of keen and nervous hours. One of these sketches, by the way, Louie herself coveted—a straggle of violets, a few white ones among them, in a lustre bowl; and she offered a certain number of sittings in exchange for it—another elementary example of the transaction in kind. But Billy shook his head. He wanted that for a wedding present for a fellow, he said. He'd give Louie another some time—after he'd found another studio. He was sick of Chelsea; when a fellow got to know the cracks in the flagstones it was time he moved. He thought of going up north somewhere, Camden Town or Hampstead or St. John's Wood—better air. So Louie could make up her mind to the bus-rides, or else move too. He wasn't going to let Henson get hold of her.

But Louie still delayed to move from Lavender Hill.

III

Louie's adventures, as she continued to sit, would fill a book: but not this book. Her sittings were the accidents of her life; her real life she reckoned from Sunday to Sunday. Sundays were the blest days she devoted to Jimmy.

He was now nearly four years old, and (as CÉleste continued delightedly to exult) "existed" and "manifested" indeed. Louie herself gave him her bath before she set out of a morning; she did so in a waterproof and little else—why, the splashed condition of the wall-paper in the poky little bathroom explained. It was the same old waterproof she had worn at Rainham Parva. Buck's admiration of the boy's chest and limbs was merely fatuous; he himself was teaching him to swim at the Public Baths. He had announced to Louie, with a great show of harshness, that the money she was fool enough to refuse, the boy would have the benefit of; that at least was something she couldn't prevent, he informed her, and though Louie scolded fondly back, it was a weight off her mind. Chaff, the other grandfather, came occasionally on Sundays; he came, for example, on the Sunday after the opening of the Royal Academy. He brought a catalogue with him, and, taking Louie into a corner, desired her to mark the numbers for which she had sat. Whether the poor old fellow meditated the buying of them all up, or what else, there was no telling. Her sittings, too, were "just like Mops." Perhaps that was more than some of the pictures were.

But it is not true, as has been reported, that for Henson's last picture, "Resurgam," Buck Causton and his daughter posed together. Buck never posed after his first marriage. Louie only posed for Henson once, and that was in wet drapery. She caught a pretty cold in consequence. She exulted in that cold; it gave her three whole days with little Jimmy. They played with tops and balls and soldiers on the floor. The boy wanted an ensign's uniform, like that of the fourth Lord Moone in the miniature, and Chaff bought him a dragoon's helmet and cuirass. Buck laughed because the cuirass was already too small; and then he sighed. Perhaps he remembered the suit of armour of Big Hugo at Mallard Bois.

Well, if a little money was all that was necessary, the boy could be put into the army by-an-by.

And so things might have gone on had they been destined to do so; but into Louie's life of busy sitting and foolish dreaming and Sunday's rompings with her boy, there came a disruptive force. Kitty Windus brought it on a Sunday morning in early June.

CÉleste was reading a story to Jimmy when she walked in; Louie was putting the last touches to a piece of crochet; and all three were awaiting Buck's arrival with the trap—he was going to take them to Hampton Court. She entered unannounced, and, to Louie's way of thinking, would have been better in bed. Her face seemed unusually small and thin; she spoke in a high, painful voice.

"Louie, I want to see you—quick——"

It was as if Louie too caught an instant alarm. Hurriedly she dropped her just-finished crochet and rose.

"What's the matter?" she asked quickly. "Come into my bedroom."

In the quite prettily furnished little bedroom Kitty began to walk rapidly to and fro. Once or twice she turned her looks to the brown-papered walls, as if she expected to find texts there; for the rest the blinking little eyes roved ceaselessly at about knee-height from the floor. Then she stopped before Louie.

"They're getting married in a fortnight," she cried harshly, accusingly.

There is no need for Louie to ask who, nor did she know what instinct again, as before, bade her take up a definite attitude without a moment's delay. She only felt in her very bones that delay would be perilous, and that not the shade of an expression must cross her face that was not natural and unsurprised.

"Yes, of course; didn't you know?" she said quietly. "Mr. Jeffries and Evie Soames, you mean?"

Again Kitty made that painful little sound—À bouche fermÉe. "You knew?" she cried.

A simple lie would not have availed; this was so obvious that Louie lied deliberately, circumstantially and at length.

"Yes, of course I knew. Of course I did. Do you mean to say you didn't? I made certain you did; I was going to write to you. In about a fortnight, isn't it? I'm—I'm giving them a wedding present; it's—it's that piece of crochet you saw me doing. It isn't much, but these things don't go by value; it's the intention. What are you going to give them?"

She almost blushed for the lameness of it. As a matter of fact, she had intended that piece of crochet for the new flat, when she should take it; but to soothe Kitty now was of more importance than crochet for new flats. She watched her covertly, anxiously.

"How did you know?" Kitty flashed out, again stopping in her walk.

"Sit down, dear; sit on the edge of my bed; I'm sure you're tired. How did I know? Why, I saw Evie herself. I saw her on a bus one day in Tottenham Court Road. It was near the Adam and Eve. And—I say, Kitty"—dropping her voice confidentially, she made an appeal to Kitty's hunger for gossip—anything for a diversion—"I doubt if they'll have too much to live on—it takes a tidy bit to get married on—and I don't suppose she has any shares to sell."

But Kitty did not seem to hear. She flashed out again.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"My dear! I made sure you'd heard it from Miriam Levey. And I wasn't sure where you were; you move about so, you know. I wonder what Miriam will give them! Something far more expensive than mine, I expect. And you ought to give them something too, Kitty. What's done's done, you know, and after all, lots of engagements are——"

But once more Kitty flashed out. "Oh, I shall give him a bottle of arnica, or whatever it is, for black eyes!"

Louie laughed almost hysterically at the joke. The tension was getting almost too much for her. "Oh, come, he isn't a wife-beater yet!" she protested.

"But he will be, that man!" Kitty cried aloud with frightening vehemence. "He'd do anything—anything—much he cares! Did you know I got lost the other night? In Lincolns Inn Fields; policemen coming up to me, if you please, and asking me where I lived! Much he cares! I believe it was her all the time—he never wanted me at all, and as soon as Archie's out of the way he goes and marries her! Miriam Levey herself says she can't help thinking it's funny—and I can't think what your game is either, to be going on as if it wasn't! I'll tell you what I think, if you want to know——"

"Hush, hush, hush!" came from Louie. She had her arms about Kitty. "Perhaps you're right, dear; he was cruel to you! And"—she rushed into another extemporisation—"I don't know that I would give him a present, after all. If one can't forgive an injury one can't, and it's no good pretending. He did wrong you, and perhaps he oughtn't to be let off, after all. I won't send him one either."

She said it because it was better to confine Kitty to her own wrongs than to allow her to approach a number of frightening unknown possibilities that began with black eyes. And apparently she succeeded. Kitty fell back on her own injury, and became a little calmer.

"Oh," she said cunningly, "but you'd have to send yours, and Miriam Levey'd have to send hers too—then, don't you see, I should be the only one who didn't, and he'd notice it! I just hope he does notice it. Serve him right. I wasn't as hard up for a fellow as all that—I carried on with a fellow at that breaking-up party. I did—you ask Mr. Mackie.... You do think Jeff never intended to marry me at all, don't you, Louie?" She peered curiously at Louie.

Well, better that, Louie thought. "I don't think he meant to for a single moment," she replied.

"Oh, the rotter. Come on, let's send your present now. We'll show him!..."

She was quite eager about it; but Louie kept her in the bedroom a little longer. Kitty began to speak of texts again. Again she wondered why "Come" was written in green and "Unto" in red and "Me" in purple, and why all texts had Oxford frames. "You haven't any, I see," she said, glancing again round the brown-papered walls. "You ought to have 'Remember thy Creator,' you know, Louie; it always reminds you, you see. What's this?"

It was one of Billy Izzard's etchings. Kitty examined it with her head a little on one side.

"It's very nice, whatever it is," she conceded; "but where's the other one? I always think pictures look better in pairs. But you can get odd ones cheap sometimes; Mr. Mackie had a great sale of Art Engravings one day in one of those Oxford Street places—you can hear his voice right across the street—and he said they were cheap because they weren't pairs, but they'd do splendidly for the middle of anywhere, like over a mantelpiece. And what a nice looking-glass! Really, you're quite comfortable here!"

She seemed to have forgotten all about Mr. Jeffries again. She walked round Louie's bedroom, bestowing encomiums and preening herself on her own pound a week.

At midday Buck came, but Louie did not join the party; she sent CÉleste and Jimmy, and herself stayed with Kitty. She hoped Kitty would not stay long; she wanted to lie down and think—think. Nor did Kitty stay very long; but before she went she returned to the subject of the crochet. She wanted the article—it was a teacloth—sent immediately; she would run out and post it herself, she said; and then, when he got presents from Miriam and Louie and none from herself, that would be rather a nasty one for Mr. Jeffries!

"Do pack it up. I'll show him I'm not to be trampled on like the dirt under his feet!" she persisted vindictively; and another approach to the subject of black eyes caused Louie to yield hurriedly. She folded the cloth and found a piece of brown paper; Kitty did not notice that she enclosed no message.

But suddenly Louie had an odd little hesitation. She knew it to be ridiculous and a sentimentality, but while she did not want to send a particular message, she yet did not want to send the teacloth entirely without one. The opportunity for the little secret luxury would probably not occur again.... Kitty was condescendingly appraising her furniture again; on the mantelpiece lay a piece of blank card; it seemed to be there almost for a purpose, and furtively Louie took it. She scrawled an "L" upon it and slipped it into the parcel.

A few minutes later Kitty left, taking the wedding present with her.

Left at last alone, Louie once more went into her bedroom and threw herself on her bed. She lay with her hands clasped behind her head, her gaze now resting on Billy's etching, now straying idly over the brown-papered walls.

So they were to be married. And after that?

Well, she thought that on the whole she was glad. The curtain was about to fall on that drama that had begun at the Business School in Holborn, and so there would be an end of that.... What now? What about those fancy pictures with which she had beguiled herself as she had ridden on buses and trams and worked at her crochet during the rests? What about those half-whispered, nonsensical conversations? What about those drowsy, secret quarters of an hour out of which she had come with slight starts to smile at herself? They were to be married. What next?

The answer came as if for months it had been merely awaiting her pleasure. It was as plain as day that she could now have as much of these as ever she pleased. For what it was worth, the freedom of her cuckoo-cloud-land was about to be definitely made over to her. Because nothing else was hers, that was all the more hers.... Kitty's tidings brought it so sharply home to her that she forgot that those sweet hours of licence were no new thing. She forgot that it was no new thing to walk, in fancy, the woods of Mallard Bois and the lanes of Rainham Parva with him by her side, no new thing to call his name down the remembered glades—"Jim!" (not, as others called him, "Jeff"). She forgot that it was old and outworn already; she saw in it only newness and liberty and delight. A Jim of sorts was now hers, ineluctably and for ever—a Jim who did not fool predestined spinsters—a Jim who would know better than blunder into a blind and stupid marriage—a Jim whose relentless hand had not—had not—had not——

But here, as she paused, the colour that had made her cheeks rosy ebbed as if a brush loaded with white had been passed over them. His ruthless hand had—had—almost certainly had——

It was as if, in her fancy, a prison bell had tolled and a black flag had been run up in the morning breeze——

He was certainly a murderer; over the threshold of that hideous fact she must step before she could enter her palace of insubstantial delights. Stained she must take even the phantom of his hand, or not at all. Suppose the joy were to leave her, but the horror to remain?

She closed her eyes.

But she opened them again. She faced it. Say he was—that; what then? The joy and the horror were fatally one. A man capable of all—all—even of that—and her lover! Oh, the moment the shudder had passed the worst was over! He had killed; yes, but for a cause! He had been horribly to be feared; yes, but without the dread of him too she would not have had the whole of him, and she wanted the whole of him. Not kill, with such a reason? Withhold death, with something approaching that was worse than death? Oh, Louie knew all about that; Miss Cora had told her....

A murder? There were things by the side of which a murder, once you had made up your mind to it, was a trifle!

Are women so? Is it so that they will place their soft hands, like willow-leaves, in those other hands that may be black with dreadful work, red with destruction, yet, seeing less than man and more than man, they care not? Is it so that they will set their lips, as if for a kiss, against the mouth of war itself with its ten thousand deaths? It seems to be so. Their loved ones, when they die, do not do so of fevers and shattered tissues, but of their own clear and trusted heroism. "Go," they say to the next one, even to the little Jimmy, "go—and come back if you may—and, though wooden props keep you together, you shall be beautiful to the mother who bore you—to the wife whose task it must be to take you to pieces and put you together again—to the woman who, because of her own heavenly dreaming, cannot think of the fiend you were in that hour when the call sounded and you dropped the point of your lance to the charge."

But one thing was clear: her dreams must remain dreams. If she would keep what was left her, she must never, never, never see him now!