I

The habit of sitting for artists leaves its mark on a woman. This mark is the lack of mystery—the "looked at" appearance. But it has its compensations. Chief of these are a physical unconsciousness, an absence of coquetry, and a liberation of the mind so complete that a sudden recall has all the effects of shock. Thus, a model posing for a whole class of men has been known to faint because she has been seen through the skylight by a "man" who mended the roof.

In some such state of liberation Louie, on an afternoon late in the June of 1900, posed for Billy Izzard. It was in Billy's new studio, a large upper room in Camden Town, opposite the Cobden Statue. The place was so light that Billy had actually had to cut some of the light off. The upper part of the far window, that towards which Louie's face was turned, was darkened by a linen blind; the lower part of it was shrouded with tissue paper. The whole corner was enclosed by a screen. It was there that Billy did his etching. Behind another screen was Billy's bed. At present Louie's clothes lay on it.

It was half-past five, but the best light of a changeable day. They had had tea; the tray with the tea-things lay on the floor; and, except that he grunted occasionally, "Raise your hand a bit," or "Head a bit more round," Billy's absorption in his work was complete. He had even worked through the short rests. During these intervals Louie had crocheted. The crochet, only a little whiter than the foot near it, lay on the throne now.

Louie was not thinking; you can hardly call it thought when any trifle on which your eyes rest gives your mind its cue. Louie's eyes, the only parts of her that moved, had rested on the crochet, and that had brought CÉleste into her mind. CÉleste was leaving her; it had something to do with phylloxera and a brother's vines; CÉleste, between two loves, must leave the boy and return to Provence. Then Louie's eyes fell on the chair in which Billy etched, and presently Kitty occupied her—Kitty, who liked her etchings in pairs, but surmised that odd ones came cheaper. Louie had really no choice but to do what she was going to do about Kitty. Jimmy must have somebody during the day, and Louie, moreover, must have ten shillings a week from somewhere. As a matter of fact, Kitty had agreed to pay her fifteen shillings, and, in the intervals of looking after Jimmy, proposed to type. Then, as her eyes moved to the screen round the bed, she remembered that her boots must be resoled. They would carry another sole, and it had been raining off and on during the greater part of the day. And then something else brought little Jimmy into her mind again.

For a wonder, she had not thought of a bigger Jimmy all the afternoon. But on other afternoons she had. Billy sometimes remarked on a passing tender colour; she always had to restrain a smile at that. Her tender colour? There was not a particle of that looked-at superficies of hers that, often and often, did not answer to a secret thought.... Perhaps Billy, plain common-sense man, could have told her what those secret thoughts really meant. Perhaps Billy, sensitive painter, could have told her how sweet and pale and charming things must shun comparison with the robuster stuff. As, in some delicate pastoral or fÊte galante, art might turn its happy eyes inward on itself, so that the putting on of a slipper and the nymph's hand trembling in a silken fold and the promised favour of a smiling look hardly die because they hardly live, so Louie too turned her eyes inwards. What she found within herself still sufficed her.

"Better rest a bit," said Billy, looking up as he began to scrub in a background.

Louie stepped down from the throne, cast a wrap about her shoulders, and began to crochet again.

Again she hoped she was not doing an unwise thing in having Kitty to come and live with her. But the flat was at last taken. It was a top one in the New King's Road. A Board School now blocks out the pretty view that Louie presently had at night, of the distant cupful of light that was Earls Court, with the illuminated advertisement of the Big Wheel appearing and disappearing as the structure slowly turned. Well, Kitty's fifteen shillings would pay the rent, and the experiment would be a good thing for Kitty also. Louie had furniture enough—in fact, it would be a very good thing—all round.

"Come along—time," Billy grunted. "And I say, can you stop a bit later to-night? I've got to go out, but if I don't finish this thing to-day I never shall——"

Louie mounted the throne again, and again the silence was broken only by Billy's stepping back from his canvas and forward again.

The light began to fail, and Billy began to work the more furiously. "Give me just another ten minutes," he muttered, a brush between his teeth; "this'll make some of 'em sit up, I think; it's painting, this is!... But I don't know, perhaps I'd better let it go as it is; it's a job, anyway. All right, Louie, thanks.... Right-o, Jeffries; I didn't think it was so late."

The last words were spoken to the man who had knocked at the door and, without waiting for a reply, walked in.

Louie had heard the steps on the stairs; perhaps—she could not tell—she had already thought it unusual that the steps had not stopped at the water-tap on the landing below that was the supply for the two upper floors. Billy used that tap when he washed his brushes; he was looking for his palette-knife now.

But Louie neither saw Billy nor heard his grumblings because the knife was not to hand. She was looking past Billy, past the easel with the study upon it, at the man who had entered. For one moment she was wondering that she had not always known, not only that he would come some day, but that he would come that day; the next moment she had told herself that she had always known that.

Of her whole body, from the foot near the crochet to the last brown hair of her head, her lips were the only portion that did not receive him with a lightsome, quiet, fair, trusting smile.

Absurd ever to have supposed that they would never meet! Wise to have known so perfectly what would happen when they did!

What had happened? Oh, every particle of her seemed to sing to every other particle what had happened! Those pittings of her profession? Oh, there they went, washed out, all out, in the baptism of a look! Her fancies—those idle promises to pay drawn on a non-existent bank? Oh, they had gone, and here was payment itself, the solid, actual cash! She was suddenly rich. As she stood there, rich in seeing him, rich in being seen by him, every one of those worthless bills was honoured in full. She could have laughed at her past poverty. She could have cried aloud: "Jim, I'm here—look at me—no, not my eyes only——"

And he too seemed to be as she had always known he would be—singled out, down to his very manner of wearing his clothes—among men. Stupid, that of all those times she had thought of him she had never once thought of him as in evening-dress! But that, in all this perfection, was only one more reciprocated perfection: she so—he so——

"Oh, Jim—not my eyes only!" she well-nigh cried again.

But the lion's eyes never moved from her own grey ones.

"Right, Louie, I've finished," said Billy, looking up from his palette-scraping.

And within herself she wailed: "Oh, so soon? Must it be over already? Must I sit for men all these days, and then, when my man comes——? Oh, a moment!... Well, he shall see me move—and I won't look at him—I'll tell myself—oh, just one more fancy!—that he isn't here."

She descended from the throne and passed behind the screen.

Was it strange that already, as she dressed in Billy's studio, she knew that she would never dress in an artist's studio again, and made of her fastening of hooks and strings a grave little ceremonial?—(There! With that fastening yet another chapter was closed; oh, trust her, there should be no reopening of it!)—Or that she should have a little shiver, at the thought that he might not have come? Suppose he had knocked at the door, and Billy had cried: "Half-a-moment—slide, Louie—come in!" Suppose—but the tremor passed. She had always known he would come; she had known it just as she had known everything else about him. Again every fibre of her was joyous. She was here on the earth—she, Louie Causton, daughter of a pugilist and of a Scarisbrick, gardener, typist, artists' model, and all else she might ever be—that she might know all about this man. To have ever doubted it would have been not to deserve him. And here he was, in the same room with her—he, beyond the screen, she behind it—only the two of them, for Billy had gone down to the tap to wash his brushes.

Now what should she do?

No, she would not go out and join him; not as she now was; not a skirt and blouse, after that fairness. Nor yet would she speak. Surely it was for him to speak now! She had been speaking to him, singing to him, all music to his eyes; there does come a point (she told herself) when the woman ceases to do everything; he must speak now. She knew he would speak. So she stood, upright, close to the screen, waiting.

He did speak, and like smoke another flock of fancies fled for ever. They were the fancies in which she had tried to remember his voice. It came, henceforth unforgettable, pure rest after her strivings. He too seemed to be near the screen; only a screen between them; but the phrases that were breaking their long silence were merely automatic. He was saying something about seeing her presently; she heard him pronounce the word "Piccadilly," and the most familiar image of Piccadilly sprang up in her mind. "Swan and Edgar's," she was whispering back over the screen.

"No, no." This came quickly, protestingly.

"At half-past ten," she whispered.

"Yes."

Then the dialogue was at an end. Billy had returned. Some moments later she heard more words, a laugh, and the closing of a door. She realised that he had gone.

Only then did she come out from behind the screen.

Billy was wriggling into his overcoat and muttering something about being late. "Got to go and keep that chap's wife company," he said. "Regular little Philistine, she is; I suppose that's why I go; can't stand these blessed artists. I say, he'd no idea I'd a model, you know—sorry."

"All right, Billy," said Louie demurely.... "Sorry!" So was not she!

"And I say, I'm afraid I shall have to pay you next time. I'm cleaned out."

"It doesn't matter. Send me a steak in as you go out; I'll have my dinner here."

"Right. Odd-looking chap that, isn't he? A good sort though. I picked him up at the Langham one night. I took this place from him when he got married."

"He lived here?" (What, another wonder?)

"Yes. Well, I'll send your steak in. Good-bye." Billy bolted.

He had lived there too! How ex—how entirely to have been expected! Louie walked round the room, looking at the walls, the ceiling, out of the windows, anew. He had lived there: read, eaten, slept there; what a coinci—what a perfectly natural circumstance! Then, leaning against the wall, she found Billy's study. Her eyes devoured it. She set it against the throne, and then walked to where he had stood when he had entered. She gave a rich, low laugh; she told herself what a fool she was; but folly so lovely made life. Again she looked at the wet painting. She had looked so to him——

She put the study back against the wall, but in another place. "That study's mine, Billy," she muttered; "mine, not yours or anybody else's, do you understand? You gave him my violets; he's welcome to them; this belongs to me. Jim! Jim!" she murmured.

"Well, I suppose it's crochet now," she went on by-and-by. "Do you realise, Louie Causton, that you've sat your last? And have you any idea of what you're going to do instead? It looks as though Kitty's fifteen shillings would come in useful after all."

As if otherwise she might have forgotten it, she repeated to herself, over and over again, that she was to meet him at Swan and Edgar's at half-past ten. At one of the repetitions—it was as she was cooking her steak over the little gas-ring that, perhaps, had once been his—it occurred to her why he had muttered that quick "No, no," when she had proposed that meeting-place. She glowed, she laughed through a sheen of tender tears. "Dear, dear one! You don't think that corner good enough for us, my sweet little outcast and me. Well, we won't thank you; we won't belittle him by thanking him, will we, Jimmy?——"

But she did not promise not to look her thanks when she met him at Swan and Edgar's at half-past ten.

Presently she pushed her plate away; she could not eat. She had felt her bosom rise once more. It had risen as it had never risen for anything or anybody save for the little Jimmy, and it rose, it seemed to her, for a similar reason. For in her hands even his physical safety lay. He was to be mothered too. Her unfelt arms were to be about him, the milk of her protection to be his life. By his strength he had thought to give himself to somebody else, but by his need he was still hers. A gladness richer than she had ever, ever known swelled within her. He, the great weakling—she, the strong one, to cherish and support——

"Jim!" she murmured, smiling, uplifted, lost. It was as if his weary, tawny head was on her breast.

And she was going to hear his voice again, at Swan and Edgar's, at half-past ten.

She feared that her own emotion might have exhausted her ere ever the hour came.

II

"Your hat will be spoiled if you don't take your share of the umbrella," she said. It was a silk hat, and she supposed that silk hats cost money. A fine, persistent rain was falling.

She thought that he answered that it didn't matter.

"Then you might at least turn your trousers up." Her own shabby old grey coat didn't matter, but his trousers——

He seemed to be on the point of replying that they didn't matter either, but changed his mind. He stooped and turned them up. She held the umbrella while he did so, and then gave it to him again, replacing her right hand where it had been—on his left forearm.

It was on these mere externals of him—his hat, his coat, his trousers, his boots—that she had hardly for a moment ceased to feed her eyes. Anything else might wait; for the present the stuff of his sleeve was more to her than the stuff of his soul. She luxuriated shamelessly in the smallest actualities of his presence; why, even mirth stood but a remove away. His overcoat, for example: it was not that old tawny one that had made him so much like a lion, but it was an old one for all that; was she never to see her man in a new overcoat? Jim and his overcoats! But the rest of him was beyond criticism. Certainly he must be making money. She wished she could have called money to him with a wand, conjured it to him, as much as ever he wanted. Had it not been that she would have had to take her hand from his sleeve, she would have liked to step back to look at his great church-door of a back again. Of his face she could see little, but that did not prevent her looking until it would hardly have surprised her had he flushed and said, "Don't gloat over me like that." His hat was tilted down, the large peaks of his overcoat collar projected like wings.

No, she did not want to know what he thought or felt; bother all that part of him! When her thirsty senses had drunk their full, then would be time enough for the other things.

They were walking somewhere behind the Horse Guards. Stretching before them was the long, empty avenue of the Mall. She was looking at the perspective of lamps and trees and drizzle, when suddenly he spoke. Instantly all her faculties seemed to become one overgrown faculty, that of hearing. Not that he was saying anything; he was, as a matter of fact, only asking her whether she was warm; and she replied, "Quite." She was almost amused that he should ask. His nearness warmed her more than did her garments. Her hand thrilled deliciously on his sleeve again....

Oh, the satisfaction of that, just that, after all her past inquisitions into his soul!

But come to speech they must, and that very soon; and perhaps that curious magnification of trifles made it easier. Indeed, half the formidableness of the single question she wanted to ask him had vanished already. To say to him, now or in a few moments: "Did you kill Archie Merridew?" seemed somehow not very much more unusual than asking him the time. Now that she came to think of it, even that question seemed less important than another one: "Can you kill somebody and still be happy?" She hoped in her heart that he could. It would be his justification. Had it been an unrighteous killing, that would have been another matter; as it was, she would have had him unhappy only had he not killed. And, as he showed no sign of breaking silence, she might as well ask him that now.

So, reluctantly turning her eyes from his face and looking ahead into the haze of the rain, she suddenly said: "Are you happy?"

She wasn't surprised that he didn't reply at once. Of course men didn't. They had their usual formalities to go through, of "Why do you ask?" and so forth—a sort of routine before they could answer a plain question. As he began to go through it now she made a little impatient movement. She didn't want all that. Then he deigned to reply to her inferior intelligence. Yes, he was happy.

"You are?" she said, with an exultant little leap.

Yes, he was; but again, apparently, he couldn't say a thing and leave it. In the middle of more stupid, logical, masculine things (he seemed to be qualifying his statement with something or other about his conduct to Kitty Windus) she cut him short.

"Tell me," she said, repeating the little impatient gesture, "you killed that boy, didn't you?"

They had been following the railings that divided the Mall from St. James's Park, but she had stopped to ask her question. And she was looking full at him now. But she could not see him very well; a lamp and a plane-tree made all an obscurity of vague shadows and wet reflections. But then he stepped slowly back, taking her umbrella with him, and twice, as he held the umbrella unsteadily, the light came and went on his cheek and chin; and then, as he took a step farther back still, the umbrella bobbed on the railings, from the points of it came little bright slivers of drops, and she found herself searching under a lamplit sector of alpaca for his eyes.

The danger of asking, actually, a question you have asked, but not actually, a hundred times before, is that your own mere familiarity with it throws you out in your calculation. Now she found herself suddenly hoping that what she felt to be working beyond the umbrella edge—for she felt it rather than saw it—was not fear.

For, of course, she had miscalculated a little—had been stupid to think that it was all as old a story to him as it was to her. Obviously it would not at once occur to him that there had been nothing to find out, but that instead the whole thing had been merely enacted before her eyes; he was sure to be thinking that on some point of evidence he had been betrayed. What sort of point that could be, unless it had something to do with the black eyes that seemed to haunt Kitty, he might know, but she could not guess; and all at once she had a purely physical shrinking. She would rather not know. She could string herself up to the thought of murder, but the bestial details—no, not those. Those were his affairs. They were to be taken for granted as things necessarily involved. And already she was on the point of feeling herself a little disappointed in him. For in the shadow of the umbrella her eyes had now found his; his head was a little turned, and she saw the whites of them.

It was fear. She, it seemed, could contemplate unafraid a sacrifice that he quaked to have carried out.

But as, with another little falling of drops from the umbrella, he steadied himself and stepped forward from the railings again, additional light came to her. It was fear, but not that fear, that haunted the amber eyes. The fear was of herself. He feared, not the information she possessed, but her whole understanding and condemnation. He feared lest she also should say: "It was murder; you are here to be judged; me too, with all the world, you must account against you; I set my mark too upon your brow."

And as he appeared sorrowfully to acquiesce in that also, nothing could have seemed lonelier nor more touching than the quietly spoken words with which he held the umbrella over her again:

"You're getting wet."

It was as though he told her that though he went outcast she must not get wet.

Her answer was to put her hand under his sleeve again. They walked on.

But he had not answered her question. Perhaps he thought he had: to all intents and purposes he had; but she wanted, not so much the word, as that he should not withhold the word. He was walking slowly, heavily, like a tower by her side; she had the sense of his fearful overweight; she would give him time. They continued to walk, their mingled shadow on the pavement as they passed each lamp creeping away before them as if the beam of some lighthouse had had the sinister property of obscurity.

Then, within a little distance of Buckingham Palace, she stopped again. Again their eyes met under the wet, black mushroom of the umbrella.

"You did kill that boy, didn't you?"

He had a slight start. It seemed to her that he even apologised for having kept her waiting for the answer. Formerly she had seen stratagems in his eyes; now, as he dipped the umbrella for a moment and stood full in the light of another lamp, she looked only into grave, candid depths.

"Yes," he said. "You know I killed him."

"Ah!"

Again her hand slid, as if of itself, back into its place. Again they walked on. The next thing that came to her was another ridiculous yet oddly precious trifle. She wore kid gloves; before, when she had danced with him in an old frock of oyster-grey, she had worn white ones; must she (she wondered) always wear gloves with him, as he always wore old overcoats? She longed to take one glove off; yet she—she, who had met Roy by the stile at night—for very bashfulness dared not. The circumstance struck her; how was that? Gifts of understanding for her he had: had he that gift too, the gift of her own bashfulness back again? Up went her spirit on wings....

Yes, it was that—or for a night at least she would have it so. As impossibilities are reconciled in a dream, so he seemed, by his mere towerlike presence, to resolve in one large atonement, her own life as it had been and the sweet and virginal and dear smiling thing that it might have been. In no less a miracle than that she seemed to herself to be walking. He could not only have kissed her; he could have had her first kiss. He could not only have turned, as he did turn, leaning against the pillar-box by the Equerries' entrance of the Palace, to look at her again, but he could have received in return—did receive in return—such a look as she knew he also could hardly have had the like of before. And it made no difference—as in a dream such a thing might make no difference—that he had a wife, she a son. Let him have his wife, she her son; she could find room for wives and sons too. To-morrow, perhaps, it would not be so; to-morrow might be like yesterday again; but to-night—to-night—oh, the first garden was not less trodden than these rainy streets, the Barracks, Gorringes', and Grosvenor Road! Her hand moving again on his sleeve was telling him even now, if he would but listen, that though man may not know that it is not good for him to be alone, woman knows it, and maybe still remembers it out of her knowledge of the place whence she came later than he.

And he too understood now, for she was not so rapt but that she remembered that he asked her, somewhere between a sandbin and a street lamp, whether she was happy too, and that, looking up at him, she smilingly whispered: "Yes, now." And she was not so rapt but that she remembered telling him, flatly and with another happy and laughing and triumphant look: "You can't prevent it!" But she was so rapt that of much else that he and she said she had no very clear recollection. Words that seemed unforgettable when they came had eluded her almost in their own echo. But she knew that she gave him the liberty of herself with no more reserve than she had claimed that of him. She knew that because, later, but she did not know when, he muttered, in some street or other, she did not know where: "God bless your boy."

Well, if she forgot things now, there would be many days to come in which she would remember them.

Merely because it must be very late—she had no idea what time it was—she grudged the going of the moments almost angrily. Already she was becoming as hungry again as if she had not broken that long, long fast. But she admitted that it was not unnatural that he should think of his own concerns a little too, and want to ask her questions. She began to answer the questions hurriedly, to get them over.—Kitty Windus? Oh (she told him) he might leave Kitty to her; she'd answer for Kitty!—His wife and her complete ignorance? (His wife's ignorance appeared to be complete.)—Miriam Levey? (Oh, why would he not be quick, and she so hungry!)—And then back to his wife again; what about her? (he wanted to know). Louie wondered a little that he should consider her to be his wife's keeper also, but she answered his questions. That, she told him, was his private affair; but, if he really wanted to know what Louie thought about it, Louie could not conceive of a marriage with so huge a secret in it continuing undisclosed. VoilÀ; there he had it; and now might she please be permitted to enter into her own happiness again?

She was back into it, bathing in it again, almost before she was aware. A minute before she had not known what street they were in; now she saw the Chelsea Hospital on the other side of the road. On this side was a row of houses; she knew one of them; a painter for whom she had sat lived there; his studio was in the yard at the back. The thought of a studio was all that was needed. She thrilled again.

No more studios! So poignantly did she burn that she could hardly imagine that her glowing did not communicate itself. Studios, after that beautiful, beautiful sketch of Billy's? Good gracious, no! She was going to Billy's to fetch that sketch on the morrow; she would like to see Billy deny it to her! And that poor, poor old oyster-grey! Just because he had seen her in it once she had mooned over it, smiled over it, sighed over it; but it could go now—she had a richer memory!... Furtively during the last few minutes she had been working off her right glove; it slipped from her hand to the pavement; but she was afraid to stop. Let it stay; somebody would turn it over with the point of a walking-stick in the morning and perhaps wonder who had lost it.... She stole another look at him; her hand crept along his sleeve; the tips of her fingers were on his wrist; her lips shaped his name: "Jim!"

Then, unexpectedly, it rushed upon her in full measure. She knew these streets familiarly; they were in Swan Walk now; and the thing happened all in a moment. Again, during those anxious questions of his about Kitty Windus, Miriam Levey, his wife, she had that sense of his terrible overweight: now, passing a doorway, he suddenly reeled. He began to sink....

In an instant her arms were about him. Not the unfelt, immaterial arms of her mothering vision in Billy's studio, not that other breast, offered but impressed, sustained him; she held him within her two arms of flesh and blood, upon that firm, warm bosom that changed its shape to his weight upon it—the bosom he had seen yesterday, white hives, all their honey his.... She bent and kissed the shoulder of his coat. Oh, if he might but faint, quite, that she might carry him somewhere, or, if she could not carry him, stay with him where he was—she cared not—rest by his side through an endless night! Her heart, yes, her lips too, called him; a whisper might not reach him; she called him aloud:

"Oh, come, come! Come, come!"

Afterwards she thought of it as a hail from a ship to another ship across a stretch of water so narrow that it was all but a stepping aboard. How could such a hail be a farewell also? They were not passing; as they glided side by side together, either seemed stationary. Other things, the whole offing of Life, were in motion; these slipped past, as it were sky, shore, shipping; but for a space he and she spoke from bridge to bridge. And he heard the hail too, for he opened his eyes. Though they never looked on her again they did so now, relinquishing all to her. Was there anything she had not known? There was nothing she might not know—now——

By-and-by she had helped him to a seat on the Embankment and had made him sit down. She took off his tie and collar; she smiled as he thanked her. "That was absurd," he said.

Then he asked her where she lived.

It was over.

Well, perhaps more would have been more than she could have borne.

But when she sat at last alone in the hansom he had called, conscious that she was wet to the skin and that her boots needed to be resoled, she still had the image of the ships before her eyes, gliding together side by side, with all else in quiet, relentless motion behind them. She held fast to it. She could not have endured to think that of that night's long wandering all that would remain on the morrow would be yet another dream and a wet glove left behind in an empty Chelsea street.

III

Louie Causton would have been more than human had she not frequently thought, as her life became a moving from pillar to post again, that there was an exasperating proportion of absence in her heart's story. But at first she was not petulant. Some absences are brimful, as other presences are mere vacancy, and, now that she no longer sat, she had other things, plenty of them, to think of.

There was little money in the sale of crochet; there was not much more in sitting in costumes hired from the Models' Club. From both these things she quickly turned. Perhaps she turned from them the more quickly because of Kitty Windus—for Kitty was now with her in the flat in the New Kings Road, and the way in which Kitty, without spoken words, paid over her weekly fifteen shillings, was in itself a spur. Not that Kitty always spared her the words either. Two words at least that she did not always spare her were "rise" and "permanency." Often Louie felt all the amazement, and now quite without any leaven of amusement, that she had felt when first she had entered the Business School in Holborn; but she was not keeping Kitty (or Kitty keeping her) either for love of Kitty or her own mere necessity. To keep Kitty was part and parcel of that absence she was already beginning to resent. It was merely safer to keep Kitty than to have anybody else keep her. Besides, as long as she kept Kitty, she had only to write a note, justifying it afterwards as best she could, and two ships (so to speak) would come together again. She delayed to write the note; none the less it was in her power to do so.

So (to turn for a moment to that moving background of Life in the offing) the September of 1900 found her answering the advertisement of a Bayswater seedsman and discovering the precise market value of her old Rainham Parva training. But by the end of the same month she was temporarily installed at the clerk's table of an exhibition of French paintings at a Mayfair gallery, and glad of the job. Say (the question is hardly worth going into) that it was the influence of the paintings themselves that once more caused a manager to propose that Louie's wages should be substantially increased, for a consideration; it didn't matter; Louie, who did not now throw away jobs for nothing, merely told the man not to be silly—than which, as it happened, she could have done no better thing, for at the close of the exhibition the manager, now looking upon her almost as a dear daughter, found her another place, this time at a gallery academic both artistically and morally, warned her against dangerous young men, and kissed Louie on both her laughing cheeks. After that her French again served her turn, for she entered the office of an illustrated weekly; or if it was not entirely the French that did it, so much the luckier Louie to possess even yet a frock that was a rest to the proprietor's eyes after a succession of applicants in walking skirts and white muslin blouses. This job Louie actually kept till June 1901; then an amalgamation took place that threw her out of work again. Three weeks later, after a severe trial of her temper by Kitty, she was a "carpet designer"—that is to say, she coloured, in an upper room near St. Paul's Churchyard, pieces of paper so minutely chequered that sometimes for an hour or two she could not get the flicker out of her eyes. She made a grace of retiring from this occupation as soon as she saw that if she did not do so her employer would retire from the office of paymaster. After that she was reduced to sitting again, in costume. Nothing else offered. Jimmy must eat, Kitty's fifteen shillings be covered. The female figure in "The Two-stringed Bow," which caused such a (journalistic) sensation in the Academy of the following year, is Louie. Chaff did not recognise it. Billy Izzard, who had seen the costume at the Models' Club, did. He persecuted Louie to sit for him again as before.

Of the Models' Club she was still a member, and she got on well with the girls. Once she took Kitty Windus there, but only once; a black-and-white man, knowing nothing of Kitty's pound a week, asked her to sit to him as Miss Tox, in "Dombey and Son"; and Kitty, presently reading the book, treated Louie for some days with marked superciliousness. That came of making yourself cheap, her manner seemed to say; and she reported Miriam Levey, whom she met near Piccadilly Circus one day, as having said, "Vell, vat do you expect?" Louie did not much like this meeting with Miriam Levey. She remembered the Jewess's pertinacity and curiosity for curiosity's sake. Many such meetings between Kitty and Miriam Levey might easily complicate her own life.

There were two bedrooms in the flat in the New Kings Road. In the larger one, that at the back that Louie shared with Jimmy, there hung at first the sketch she had begged ("stolen" was Billy's word) after she had ceased to sit. When Louie took this down one day and put it out of sight, she told herself that she did so on Jimmy's account; but perhaps those absences that she had to convert into presences as best she could had something to do with it too. Perhaps, if she did not see the thing for a time, its first freshness would return.

Sometimes she thought these absences really too bad; she began to think so with increasing frequency as Kitty's fits of patronage became no rarer. Really it didn't seem fair that she should be asked to bear them. The least Jim could have done, since she bore them for him, would have been to let her know that he still existed. She did not much mind looking after Kitty, but it was a little too much that on his part all should be absence!

And that was why, with Kitty always at hand for her excuse, she did not write to him.

In a word, the joy of bearing for him was becoming fainter in proportion as the burden itself increased.

Then a piece of news with which Kitty came home one night added its trifle to her smart. She was alone in the flat that night; Jimmy had been in bed two hours and more, and Louie, after having folded his clothes, cleared up his litter of toys from the floor, and tried to read a newspaper, had turned low the gas, drawn up a chair to one of the three windows that looked down on the New Kings Road, and sat gazing out over the trees and houses and scattered lights that stretched away to Earls Court. It happened that that night the Exhibition was closing for the season; a firework demonstration was in progress; and out of the little pool of orange light rockets rose from time to time, falling again in slow showers of red and green and white. If no cart was passing she could just hear the muffled detonations.

She knew that if an impossibility could have happened, and Jim could have walked into the room, sat down by her, and watched the white and green and red rockets with her, that slight constant smart at her heart would have gone; but now she told herself that it was not as if she was young, with unlimited time before her. She was thirty-two, and too much absence is not sustenance enough for thirty-two. But that, she supposed, meant nothing to a man. Men did not appear to get old in quite the same way. The man who had tried to make love to her at the French picture exhibition was sixty if he was a day; sixty, and still fiery; and apparently he had found her still desirable also. But it was not for much longer. Women died with their beauty. Of course she had her little darling asleep there; men had the comfortable theory that women wanted nothing more than to "live again" (as they called it) in their children; well, all that Louie could say was that she did not agree with them. She knew one woman who wanted more. It might be wicked and unnatural to endow Jimmy, as she had done, with a sort of vicarious father, but Roy was gone out of her life—gone; to have married him would have made more mischief than it would have cured; and Louie saw no reason for not telling herself the truth about herself. But a vicarious father who stayed away was altogether too vicarious....

Well, well, she supposed that if a woman would have a man at all she must put up with a selfish one.

He, of course, knew exactly what he wanted, and had got it; nor could she say that he had not earned it—grimly. But now that he had got it, what about somebody else who was helping him to keep it—somebody called Louie Causton, who stepped in when she was wanted, took half the burden off his back, and was presently sent about her business again? (For she had remembered now the quite personal, preoccupied questions, about Kitty and Miriam and his wife, that he had put to her on the night of their long walk.) Oh, no doubt she would be there when she was next wanted, to share with him the thing another woman ought to have shared (but thank goodness the other woman had not!). It had not in the least surprised Louie that his wife knew nothing. It would have surprised her very much indeed if she had known anything. Jim might humbug himself as he liked, but at the bottom of his heart (she now saw) he knew better than to tell her. She was not the kind; it was Louie who was that kind, and he knew it too. But there: she was pretty, and men asked no further; give them hair and eyes and an unlined brow and the rest could go hang. Heart and vision—no; courage and devotion and the strength to bear—no; but twenty years, a curving eyelash, and a bloom more quickly gone than the falling rockets yonder, and ah, how they ran! But they didn't trust them. No, the other sort was sent for then. And it was the business of the other sort to be, always, as strong as they sometimes thought themselves.

The last rocket fell; the lights of the big wheel began to make quicker revolutions; and Louie left the window and turned up the gas again.

As she did so the electric bell in the kitchen rang. It rang again, and then Louie remembered that the street door four floors below would be closed for the night. She passed out on to the landing and descended the stairs. It was Kitty. She had forgotten her key. Kitty panted as they ascended again.

"How long have you been in?" she demanded, as she took off her hat and coat in the little hall.

"All the evening," said Louie. "Have you had supper?"

"No, I haven't," said Kitty shortly, and then came her grumble. Why hadn't Louie had the gas lighted? Fireworks indeed! And there Kitty had been waiting for twenty minutes and more, thinking nobody was in—anybody might forget their key once in a while, mightn't they? Hadn't Louie forgotten hers not a week ago, and that not the only time? Kitty had a right to forget her key sometimes. And there had Louie been in all the time, watching fireworks! Well, what was there for supper? And the fire almost out too; really, if Kitty paid for the coals, Louie might at least keep the fire in!

Louie mended the fire and got Kitty's supper. When Kitty had finished she cleared the little round table again, and by the time Kitty had put on a pair of red bedroom slippers and turned up her skirt to the blaze she deigned to relent a little. She admitted that it wasn't as if Louie had known she was waiting in the street, but all the same it was annoying.

"And now I've got a piece of news for you," she said, warming her hands. "It's a dead secret, but I don't suppose Miriam would mind my telling you. She's in for no end of a good job in a few weeks! But she always gets good jobs. She has determination, Miriam has, you see."

Louie was standing by the end of the mantelpiece, stirring a cup of cocoa. She only said "Oh?" Her own lack of determination was now an old reproach.

"Ra-ther! Have you heard me speak of a Mr. Pepper ever? But no, you won't have; you're always a bit sniffy about Miriam, you see, and that doesn't encourage people to talk. Well, she's his confidential clerk at the Freight and Ballast Company, but he's chucking that, and who do you think with?—James Jeffries!"

She paused to see the effect on Louie, and then continued.

"Yes, James Jeffries! What do you think of that? They're going to start on their own, in no end of a swell way, and Miriam's going over with them. It's Mr. Pepper's doing, of course, and as Mr. Pepper isn't exactly a nobody even where he is, you may bet your boots he won't change for the worse! Oh, James Jeffries knows the kind of person to hang on to! He's to be a partner, if you please, as good as Mr. Pepper himself; how's that for greasing in? Friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, I don't think!"

Kitty had this way now of speaking of her former fiancÉ. Sometimes she so extended his name that it became "Mister James Herbert Jeffries." And however Jim now "got on," his advancement would still be, to Kitty, a magnification of her own superiority in those days when she had had a pound a week and he nothing. She began to take out hairpins and went on.

"Oh dear, I wish my brushes were here!" (Louie fetched them.) "What was I saying? Oh yes, about Miriam. She's to have an office to herself, perhaps, or at any rate she's not going to sit with the other girls; and when I tell you it's in Pall Mall, you can judge for yourself—not just a couple of offices rented, but a whole building—what ho! The stone that the builders rejected if you like! And she'll have her own extending-bracket telephone, the very latest, and arms to her chair to put her elbows on, not like the typists! And Mr. Pepper's most friendly with her—she takes down his conversations with no end of swells! And I say, Evie Jeffries won't be half set up over it all, oh no! Even his office—James Herbert's, Miriam says—is going to be perfectly scrumptious!"

Her head was on one side; her short hair, as she brushed it, hardly reached farther than the sharp point of her shoulder; and Louie was thinking of that spurious engagement again. And suddenly—this had happened before, but never before with so keen a stab—the thought set her raging.... She herself had been so near!... Her elbow caught her cup of cocoa; it spilt, and ran in a little stream from the corner of the mantelpiece.... So near! And once again she cried to herself that she would have known how to keep him, Roy or no Roy!... Kitty? What could his courtship of Kitty and her bones have been? She would have shown him the difference! To have been so near and then—Mortlake Road, Putney!

Suddenly there seemed to her to be a great deal to be said for conventional morality after all.

For a moment her heart was full of hate—hate of Kitty, hate of Evie Jeffries, hate of Roy, hate of herself. To have been so near!

But the sharpness of it died down to a sullen ache. In his affairs he seemed to be going up, up; she had always known he would; and less than ever might she expect to hear from him now. And he would take his common little wife up with him. He might go anywhere, meet anybody; but sourly she wondered what sort of a figure he supposed his Evie would cut up there—would have cut at Trant or Mallard Bois? Oh, Louie would dearly have liked to see her there, to have pointed to her, and to have told Jim to his face that whatever ability he might have seemed to be yoked with an unimaginable stupidity, since he had not known instantly the one woman for him.

Well, there was simply no accounting for these things.

But if he was going up, Louie did not very much like the channel by which she had received the information. She had known that Kitty saw Miriam Levey; now she seemed to hear her thick voice again, "I vill find out!" She was aware, too, that there was little love lost between Miriam Levey and herself. She herself had encouraged Kitty in her present attitude of "Mister Jeffries," but it only needed the Jewess to propose the contrary attitude and in all probability there would be a struggle between them for the possession of Kitty. She detested Kitty; yet in order that Evie Jeffries might make an exhibition of herself among the people whose equal Louie was, Louie had to put up with her, bones and chilblains and all! Much he left her, didn't he? Good gracious, yes! And it was about time he was told that flesh and blood women weren't made like that!

Kitty, remarking that it was a shame to leave the now glowing fire, had passed out of the room for a minute; she now returned, in her slippers and nightgown. Her feet, she said, were still cold with waiting on the pavement; she would say her prayers with them turned to the fire. She knelt by a wicker chair, and set the red slippers on the low kerb, their worn soles to the fire. Louie, still from the end of the mantelpiece, watched her. At a slight sound she made Kitty turned her head for a moment; then she put it on the cushion of the chair again.

Yes, certainly Louie must have a wicked heart, or she would not have looked on the kneeling woman as she did. She wondered what, texts apart, Kitty could have to say to God. To pray—with her feet in a warm place! Why, Louie mortified herself more for an absent man than Kitty seemed to do before her Maker!... And even when she had stifled the thought she still had no more than a negative compassion for Kitty. She was not unsorry for her and her weakheadedness; beyond that Kitty was not, or ought not to have been, her affair. What was her affair was herself and what little remained of her youth. Kitty was hardly more than a year or two older than she, but she looked a dozen years older; Louie wondered whether her shoulder blades too would soon resemble the set-squares in Billy's studio, whether her waist also would seem a broken thing within empty looking folds....

Kitty continued to pray and to warm her feet. Louie, wondering what her next snappishness would be when she rose from her knees again, continued to watch her.

Then Kitty rose. She turned to Louie.

"By the way, did you brush that blue skirt of mine?" she said. "Oh, very well, it doesn't matter now; perhaps I oughtn't to have asked you; thank you; I can do it myself in the morning. Sorry I spoke."

Louie turned away.

These were the times when she could hardly tell what had possessed her ever to have supposed that she would be able to keep watch and ward over Kitty at all. Kitty was perfectly free to meet Miriam Levey or anybody else she had a mind to meet. And why, she asked herself at these times, should she not meet her? Where, hanging and such moonshine apart, was the risk to Jim? Indeed, it seemed to Louie that that story that seemed so to weigh on Jim was quickly becoming altogether beside the mark. The whole venue of his difficulties was rapidly shifting. What he had done had not been discovered and probably never would be discovered; what he wanted now was, not to be protected from remote and shadowy and nonsensical dangers, but to be told how he was to be happy with the wife whom he had seen fit, in the great heap of his wisdom, to keep in ignorance. Of course the remoter danger need not be entirely forgotten, but this, or else Louie was greatly mistaken, was what those scarce-heard questions on the night of that long walk had really meant.

And, in that case, what the devil was she, Louie Causton, doing in this gallery at all, with nothing of Jim but silence and absence, and nothing but peevishness and petty tyranny from Kitty? Roy, it might be, was still ready to marry her; Buck never ceased to importune, sulk and implore; Jimmy, one way or another, would be to provide for; and she knew now how little she could do for him alone. Even her desire to "show" Richenda Earle had now passed. She wanted, desperately wanted, all the things she persisted in rejecting. Why was she becoming morose, disillusioned, devil-may-care? It was a familiar question now, but as she undressed that night she asked herself again what it all meant.

She answered herself that there was no mystery about it. She supposed it happened to every woman. It meant, of course, the passing of her youth.

But, her head on her pillow, she had her compensating hour. No need to re-describe its kind; there was now added again that forced and desperate illusion, of the unity of herself, her boy, and the man she would have had his father. She knew she merely abused her fancy and must suffer for it afterwards, but no matter; if it was a drug it was a sweet one, and that it might stay with her a little longer she chose uncomfortable positions that would keep her awake. She could hear Jimmy's breathing across the dark room. Jim, Jimmy and herself——

It was against her own will that, at two o'clock in the morning, she slept.

IV

It was his voice over the telephone of the Models' Club that broke the long silence. Ten chances to one but the bell had rung in an empty room, for, save for a woman who was washing the hall floor, Louie was alone in the place. She unhooked the receiver. "Hallo!" she called.... "Yes, this is the Models' Club.... This is Miss Causton...."

At last!

He did not say why he wanted to see her; he only said that he wanted to do so at once. His minimised voice, with its suggestion of distance, seemed to her curiously symbolic of their whole relation. A telephone was supposed to bring voices near, but far more than that the smallness and the distance struck her.

"No, I'm afraid not," she continued to speak into the instrument, "but I can give you dinner here. You know the address?... Yes, at seven.... All right...."

Seek him? No, she certainly would not seek him. He must come to her. She could give him tea and chops. As she hung up the receiver again she glanced at the clock over the little service counter. Eleven. Eight hours.... She had waited for months, now she must wait another eight hours. She could have faced the months again with more composure.

Only to look at the advertisements in the papers had she come to the Club that morning at all. Well, she was not going to answer that clairvoyant's announcement she had seen in The Telegraph now. Kitty would ask her that evening whether she had been looking for work, and would hold up Miriam Levey and her determination as an example; let her; Louie couldn't be bothered with clairvoyants and their advertisements to-day.

And Kitty little dreamed how near Louie had more than once been to showing herself as determined even as Miriam. Miriam was not the only one who might be "taken on" at this new Consolidation of Mr. Pepper's and Jim's, whatever it was. There is such a thing, when a man doesn't come to you, as a miserable, ignoble yielding to the ache to go to him. There is such a thing as the willingness even to keep a door all day for the sake of seeing him go through it just once. After a certain time pride becomes a poor staff, and—but he was coming, in eight hours. That was why she had refused to dine with him. Your pride stiffens again when you have just been on the point of throwing it aside.

She knew that she would be good for nothing for the rest of the day; in that case she might as well go and see her father. She had money enough for her bus fares; half-past one found her at the Molyneux Arms.

Buck was in high feather. His name had been proposed, in the interests of Church and State, as a candidate for the Borough Council; and the chief plank of the platform which Buck occupied during the whole of that afternoon, descending from it with the greatest reluctance only when Louie vowed that she could not stay another moment, was that as long as England had Queensberrys to make her P.R. Rules it didn't matter what Radicals tried to make of her laws. Louie fondled his silver hair; dear old dad! Then she made him drive her back to Chelsea.

(Buck, by the way, was returned at the head of the poll, a few weeks later, amid acclamations that might well have rendered him deaf in his other ear also.)

Back in the Club once more, Louie set aside the best chop, and made a tour of the place in search of the narrowest table. The one she chose was so narrow that the backs of the two chairs she turned up against it almost touched. Lightheartedly she rebuked Myrtle Morris, who asked her whether she was expecting "a boy"; and she laughed as Myrtle went off to tell another girl that "Causton was on the warpath." Her warpaint consisted of a white blouse, low and perfectly plain at the neck, and a navy blue skirt. She was waiting at the window for Jim twenty minutes before he came.

She had schooled herself to a rigorous composure. She opened the door for him and told him to mind the hall lamp, within an inch of which his hat reached; and the hand she gave him was not gloved this time. But she barely touched his hand; had she not two whole hours before her? He put aside a cheap hanging of rustling beads for her to pass, and then followed her into the large room on the left of the hall, empty save for a piano and a few chairs, that was used for parties and tableaux. Myrtle and another girl appeared for a moment in the doorway; the minxes appeared to be waltzing, but they had come to see who "Causton's boy" was; and as they sat down she asked him, as if daring him to find any but the plainer meaning in it, how Billy Izzard was. She exulted that she could say these things and he could not. Then she was told that their chops were ready. They passed into the next room.

The table—it was a flimsy card-table covered with a cheap traycloth stiff with starch—accounted for all awkwardnesses and proximities; again she found it secretly delicious to murmur a demure apology for its smallness. She lingered over the eating of her chop merely because her plate was edge to edge with his; she would manage badly if she could not keep him at least two hours! Then, when she could linger out her eating no longer, she asked him for a cigarette and a light—for in the studios she had learned to smoke. He gave them to her. Her lids hovered as he held the match; she wondered whether she should look straight into his eyes or keep her lids downcast. In the end she did both, looking at him first, then down. Whether he looked at her at all she did not know; the first at any rate was a miss. She did not ask for a second match (she had, she told herself, some shame); instead, she put her elbows on the table and said, without further delay: "Well, what is it?"

She nodded as he began to tell her; it seemed to be pretty much what she had expected. She listened, or half listened; she would not have sworn, had he challenged her, that her attention did not wander a little. Her thoughts were ahead of his, but a little patience—he would catch up; he would see presently that what his wife might think or what she might not think (for that was what he was talking about) was of less practical importance than he supposed. Naturally his wife must be thinking this and that; marriage that left such a thing as a—call it a private execution—out of the calculation might even turn out to be a little difficult; but she might as well hear what he had to say about it. She waited for the cropping up of the names of Miriam Levey and Kitty Windus; they duly appeared. Mrs. Jeffries, it seemed, wanted to see Kitty, and Miriam Levey wanted her to do so. Why they wanted these things was not very clear, but possibly, if Louie was giving him only half her attention, Jim was not saying all he knew either. He still considered that aspect of the affair to be wholly and solely the problem: but no doubt he would wake up by-and-by.

Suddenly she asked him whether he and his wife had quarrelled. He shook his head that apparently, in spite of its stupidity, she must still love.

"No—oh no."

"Well——"

And on he went again, still quite a number of leagues behind—the complication of his former engagement to Kitty, Evie's sense of unexplained things, Miriam Levey, her voracious curiosity, her presence at this new Consolidation.

But here she interrupted him. "One moment. When do you start—this Consolidation?"

He was toying with a knife; the little reflection passed over his massive face as he turned the blade. "In a few weeks. Why?"

"You don't intend to take Miriam Levey over with you?"

He put the knife down with a little slap. "I do not," he said. Louie had thought as much. So, no doubt, in spite of what she seemed to have said to Kitty, had Miriam Levey.

"Well, go on; I interrupted you," she said.

He went on. It seemed to her that if nothing had actually happened his overcarefulness was the one way likely to bring it to pass. Then, she supposed, he would ring her up on the telephone again.

By this time she was thinking far more of Miriam Levey's empty chair at the new Consolidation than she was of things unaccounted for between her guest and his wife.

And as for those unexplained things (Louie neither knew nor cared what they might be), she could only tell him now what she had told him that night when they had walked together, that wives must either be wives or not, must be told things or else be something less than wives. Perhaps she had not put it quite so plainly to him as that before, but that was what it had amounted to. Men with secrets ought to marry the right women.... She stole a daring look at him across the table. He was mumbling and twiddling a spoon now. His shoulders, bigger than Buck's, were clothed in an exquisite iron-grey cloth; she wondered whether he knew that she had kissed one of them that night in a Chelsea doorway.... And then, as he paused and looked up, she spoke. She did so almost curtly. If not telling hadn't answered, she said, she could only suggest, once more, telling. As for Kitty, he might put her entirely on one side; as long as she remained with Louie, Louie would answer for her.

Then, for the first time, he seemed to show a gleam of interest in her affairs. He asked her how she got her living, now.... Her pulse quickened. Billy had told him, then; by "now" he meant now that she no longer sat; and his eyes avoided hers. He coloured; apparently he thought he was doing her an honour in wiping out all memory of that discovery in Billy's studio. An honour! She could have laughed at him. He little knew how she longed to tell him more—to tell him about the oyster-grey too—to tell him that for her it was as long ago as that. But no, he had seen the pearl——

And it appeared that his talk really had an object now; but, as usual, she had seen the drift of it before he had. He was thinking of Miss Levey's place, if his absurd delicacies would only allow him to get it out.

"Would you accept it?" he managed at last to ask, sounding her earnestly with his eyes.

"Steady, silly woman," she whispered to herself, brightly flushing....

But, glancing at him, she suddenly winced. Twice before men had offered her posts, at more than their market value, and there had been no colour in her cheeks as she had refused them; had she coloured now at the quick thought that if he had made such an offer she might perhaps...? If so, there was mortification and despite in her colour. Why did he offer her Miss Levey's place? Was it his wife again—always his ninny of a wife? If that was so, so much the worse for him; it was time he learned that if he got into a mess he must make shift to get out of it again. There was a new little twang in her voice as, suddenly looking into his eyes, she said: "You've no right to expect that of me!"

And as soon as the words were spoken, she saw too where she herself stood, and to what point beyond she was prepared to go. She knew now that she would have taken his job, not at added wages, but without wages at all. But to the humiliating thought that he imagined himself to be doing her a kindness was now superadded that of his entire ignorance that she might be making an attack upon his faithfulness at all. Suddenly she saw herself merely wonderful to him—she wonderful!—she, who had thought she could spend all her life up in the clouds, be content to be magnanimous for magnanimity's sake, virtuous for the mere love of virtue! Oh, if that was all, he needn't think that any longer! Wonderful?... What she wanted was not wonderful at all, oh dear, no: merely something common, coarse, filling; nothing more wonderful than that.... Wise mother, to have known that that was the end of it all, and to have taken, long ago, in Henson's studio, the short cut! She did not even try to check a wild little exclamation....

And he evidently saw something too, though what, as he blundered deeper, she did not stop to inquire. He gave a groan. "Poor woman!" he said compassionately.

He might just as well have set a spark to a fuse. There broke from her a peremptory cry.

"Not that, Jim—that's the one thing I will not bear—I will not be called 'poor woman'——"

And the rest now had to follow. It was the sum of her broodings, resentments, hatreds, dreams, desire, despair. Evie, him, herself—oh, it was not her fault if he didn't see now how the three of them stood. He knew only too well what he wanted: what Louie wanted she also knew only too well. Except to offer her a job that would save him even the trouble of ringing her up on the telephone when her help was required, had he ever, until this moment, looked at the thing from her point of view? He had not. She would help him still; but if their ships must part like this, at least no false tidings should pass from bridge to bridge: he should know exactly what it was he asked, and why she gave it! She began to speak rapidly, uncertainly, but sparing him nothing. Perhaps, after all, she said, his wife would understand; he had only to tell her that her husband made away with her sweetheart; perhaps she could bear it; if she couldn't well—he knew what was his for the holding up of a finger....

Then, as suddenly as she had begun, she stopped. Her voice dropped. "I've had no luck," she said, with quiet bitterness. "I'm out of it, and there's no more to say. Give me a match."

And then she rose. He might sit there if he liked.

He rose too, and they walked down the room in silence together. The bead screen of the hall parted and tinkled together again behind the great church-door of his back. Without a word he took down his coat and, under the coloured hall lamp, hoisted himself into it. And then he looked at her.

Already in her heart she knew that that look was the end. Her offer had been rejected. Whatever else might happen, she, Louie Causton, would never come between him and his wife. The woman who had those eyes would keep their looks; had it been Louie's fortune to have them, she would have kept their looks. He was a plotter, but not of amours; a carrier through too, but not of intrigues. So grave an innocence was his that probably he didn't know that his look told her all this; if so, it was final indeed.

So she took her dismissal, and then, with her hand on the letter-box of the door, stood gazing meditatively on the ground. She had wanted to be wooed; failing that, she had once more brought herself to woo; and this Joseph had gravely repelled her.

At last she looked up.

"About what you were saying—I mean that place of Miss Levey's," she said. "I don't think it would do—not now."

The man who could plan a murder but not an affair looked humbly up.

"Why not?" he murmured. It was as if he said: "I don't remember that meetings of ours in Billy's studio; I forget this too. You see how it is. Your taking the job would make no difference."

Slowly she shook her head. "I should be seeing you," she said. "It wouldn't do. Good-night."

She saw that she had missed even more than she had imagined.

And yet, before Christmas came, she was at that self-same Consolidation. In October a lofty refusal; in December a creeping back again with her tail between her legs. Where, she asked herself, was her pride now?

The answer was that that had been in October, and this was December.

When she told Kitty that she was succeeding to Miss Levey's place Kitty had certain things to say about treachery and broken friendships. She said them at some length, and then remarked that after that of course Louie could hardly expect her to stay with her.

"You never liked her," she said, as if not to like Miss Levey was an offence in itself. "And I know you tried to keep me from seeing her. Oh, you think I don't notice things, but you never made a greater mistake; I could tell you things that would surprise you! You and James Jeffries have got some game on; don't tell me he didn't give her the push; Evie and Miriam both say so; oh, you're a deep one, Louie Causton! First you come between me and Miriam; and then that day your father came and I was asking him about black eyes and he told me you could have one without having one till you came to blow your nose—oh, I watched you! And then to go worming about till you got Miriam fired and then bag her job yourself! Thank goodness, some people have better ideas of friendship than that! I have, for one. Never mind the bit you owe me; you can pay Carter Paterson with it and we'll call it quits. Perhaps it wouldn't be troubling you too much to ask you if you knew where the luggage labels are?"

So Louie let her go. The tract she received by post on the following day: "God's Eye Everywhere, or No Sins Secret," she dropped into the fire. Even if Kitty really was groping blindfold on the track of that stale old private execution, Archie Merridew didn't matter now. The question had already entered the stage of blank fatality.

V

Louie did not succeed to Miss Levey's chair at once. Somebody else got that, who made room for somebody else, who made room for Louie. And her arrival at the Consolidation appeared to be the signal for Jim's almost immediate departure from it—that is to say, she saw him for three weeks, then missed him for some days, asked (in another week or so) a question, and was told that a fall of some sort, supervening on many weeks of concentrated work, had necessitated a trip to Egypt. She hinted that she would like to know what his fall had been, but nobody seemed able to tell her. As a matter of fact, she never knew. It was merely an act of spite on the part of the stars against herself.

The ordeal by absence began again.

This time she was able, somehow, to endure it. She always remembered him when she passed a shipping company's office, with a model of a liner in the window and pictures of palms and pyramids and a sphinx not altogether unlike himself looming up out of the tawny sand; but at other times she well-nigh forgot him for whole days together. She could hardly question her immediate superior, a Mr. Whitlock, about him, and probably Mr. Whitlock could not question Sir Julius Pepper—for Mr. Pepper was made a knight in the new year. Sir Julius had altogether too much nous and urbanity to be questioned; he asked, not answered, questions. Such an indiscretion would have stamped Mr. Whitlock himself as a man of a barbarous mind.

The place itself, its plate glass and marble, its gilded lifts and high galleries and lofty central dome, its floes of desks and counters and the tessellated floors over which rubber-tyred trollies ran to the strong-room every night—astonished Louie. What had been consolidated, who the men had been who had reconciled interests so great that the mere overcoming of their mass and inertia must have been accounted a wonder, she never really knew. Perhaps nobody really knew; perhaps not so much men as forces had accomplished that task. In some of its aspects the concern was a huge amalgamation of mercantile companies, mostly railway and shipping; in others it more nearly resembled a Government Department. But she knew that Jim knew all about it. Jim, Mr. Stonor (Mr. Whitlock's junior) told her, and Sir Julius, had planned the whole enterprise. Acting alone, Mr. Stonor said, Jim might have done the work and then have been shouldered out of the rewards by such bustling men as Robson, of the Board of Trade, George Hastie and Sir Peregrine Campbell, and others to whom Louie had lifted up her eyes when she had kept the appointment-books for the photographer in Bond Street; but Sir Julius had seen to that—trust Sir Julius! Sir Julius could cut a throat smiling with the best of them; if Jim was the genius, Sir Julius was the impresario of the enterprise. And by-and-by, from the frequency with which Sir Julius and other potentates said, when puzzled: "What d'you suppose Jeffries would do?" or "Why the deuce isn't Jeffries here?" Louie came to much the same conclusion.

At first she was set to work with twenty other girls who, each sitting under a porcelain-shaded incandescent that burned all day long, tapped typewriters in the back part of the building that looked down on the white-tiled well; and for some weeks it was a question whether she kept her job or not. For she was dreadfully inefficient, and daily expected a reduction to the level of the girls who, with rigid "dolly-caps" clamped round their heads, manipulated the rubber worms of the big telephone switchboard. But again her improved French served her turn. Miss Lingard, who sat in Miss Levey's chair behind a screen twenty yards away, was absent one day; Mr. Stonor haled Louie off to Sir Julius's room; and Louie, following Sir Julius and a Frenchman from one to another of the spring-roller maps with which the room was lined, took down in English short-hand a conversation in French about the boundaries of some concession or other. It was a badly botched job, but it was initialled and passed; and Sir Julius, who did not so much open doors and place chairs as allow it to be discovered that doors were opened and chairs placed exactly when they should have been, looked at Louie, thanked her, and presently sent for her again. One night she had to wait on him after dinner at an hotel, to make notes of certain conversations; and perhaps Sir Julius noted the little dipping of Louie's mouth when she was summoned from the ante-room where she had been kept waiting. She wondered whether he had expected she would turn up in a dolly-cap. A little after that he asked her out to dinner, without any business excuse at all. Presently she was wondering whether she would have to walk out of the Consolidation or else to tell Sir Julius Pepper not to be a fool.

It never came to that; exactly how near it was to doing so, Louie never knew. It was her Uncle Augustus of all people who saved the situation. His name came up; Louie could not restrain a sour little smile; and "Do you know Lord Moone?" Sir Julius asked. "Oh yes," Louie replied. That was all. Sir Julius's charming smile never varied. But the case was altered. Amanuenses of sorts are one thing, ladies with private information about the peerage another. Perhaps Sir Julius was a little of a snob. At any rate, he did not allow his little gallantries to interfere with business.

So Louie became a quite superior writer of Pitman's shorthand. The weeks passed. Jim still remained away.

Nor had she any news of Kitty Windus, of Miriam Levey, nor yet of Evie Jeffries. She still, however, remained good friends with Billy Izzard. It was from Billy that she heard, one night in April, something that filled her with a vague and ineffectual trouble.

She had gone up to his place in Camden Town, intending to spend an hour or so with him; but five minutes was all the time Billy had to spare for her. He was just off to Victoria to meet a fellow, he said; if she was going that way they could go together; and she needn't think he was going to leave her in the studio to steal his sketches. "One of our heroes just come back from South Africa, a fellow called Lovenant-Smith," he said. "Coming?"

"I'll go with you as far as Charing Cross," said Louie.

Before she left Billy at Charing Cross she had learned quite a lot about his friend, Mr. Lovenant-Smith. There was nothing especially heroic about Roy's homecoming; no doubt his work had been useful, but it had not been fighting; for a year and a half he had not left Cape Town. He had now come into money, and was handing in his papers; he would hunt and manage his estate somewhere down in Shropshire. "I shall go and stop with him," said Billy. "I only hope his horses are better than that old yacht he nearly drowned the pair of us in." And at Charing Cross he left Louie.

Roy was back home, then.

Well, it made not one atom of difference. Jim away was all to her, Roy in England nothing. No doubt it was wicked.

So much the worse for Louie.

Then, not a week later, Jim returned from Egypt.

But he returned only to go away once more, this time to Scotland. She saw him, for just one moment, coming out of Sir Julius's room. He was very brown, but much thinner, and he had a new overcoat. He went straight on to Scotland that day. Mr. Stonor said that he intended to stay there for the rest of the summer. "Overwork, of course," said Mr. Stonor.

So yet another absence in her story of absences began.

She filled it chiefly with work. She rarely got home before ten, and, save on Saturdays and Sundays, had to leave Jimmy entirely to the young woman who had succeeded CÉleste. Billy had left town, and had probably gone to stay with Roy in Shropshire. Of Councillor Causton she now saw little. She wished she could save more money. Jimmy was now five and a half years old.

Then, in October, Jim returned from Scotland. Louie half expected that it would be she who would have to leave now, but this did not happen. Not that she saw much of him; he did not come until eleven, and went home again for tea. Sometimes, after he had left, she or Mr. Stonor had to ring him up at his house in Well Walk, Hampstead; for the rest, he remained in high seclusion. She was glad it was so. A half absence such as this had not all absence's pangs, nor was his half presence too much perturbation; she could take a command with calmness, and she had nothing but commands to take. She knew by this time that he had a second child, a little girl, and that seemed definitely to close and bar the door against any wild and lawless hopes she might ever have entertained. And so things went on until early in December.

The thing that entirely changed their course may have seemed an accident to Jim, but a little reflection made it plain enough to Louie. She had not seen Evie Jeffries since that afternoon when they had met at the step of the bus opposite the Adam and Eve; and Evie's whole face and manner gave the lie to the story she told when, at a little after three o'clock one afternoon, Louie came upon her in the counting-house of the Consolidation itself. Near the table with the calculating machines Louie heard a clerk whisper: "Mrs. Jeffries!" Forty pairs of eyes were furtively watching her over desk-rails and glass screens. Some of the clerks even made errands in order to get a better view of her. If she wanted her husband she had only to ask to be taken to his room at once, but she stood, a slender figure in new black furs, by a waiting-room door. Then, seeing Louie, she almost ran to her.

"Oh, how are you?" she cried, in an acquired voice, touching Louie's hand then dropping it again. "Really, this place almost terrifies me! I came to fetch my husband home to tea—the car's outside—but of course I know I'm early. I'd such a lot of shopping to do, but I got through it quicker than I thought. Well, how are you?"

It seemed to Louie that she did not do it very well; the manner of the grande dame was the last thing she ought to have attempted. As Evie put up her hand as if it held an invisible quizzing-glass, Louie wondered whether she had come primarily to see her husband at all.

"Really, this is stupendous!" she said. "I wonder if you could show me round—that is, unless I'm interfering with your duties? Do tell me what these things are!"

They were the mechanical calculators; her comment on them was: "How quaint!" Followed by eyes, Louie took her to the lifts; she said they must have one like that put into the new house they had taken in Iddesleigh Gate. "It used to belong to Baron Stillhausen—you've heard of Baron Stillhausen, the famous diplomat?" she said. From the lifts Louie took her to the department where the girls in dolly-caps pulled at the snaky telephone plugs. "Oh," she exclaimed, "so this is where you talk to my husband in the evenings from, is it?"... Louie had a little start.... She answered, however, that the private line was in another place, and led the way. No, Evie Jeffries oughtn't to attempt this kind of thing; her touch was too heavy. She told more about herself than she ascertained about anybody else. As they left the private line Louie somehow had the impression that Evie Jeffries was counting the paces from Louie's chair to her husband's room.

She returned to her own place slowly. She wished Evie Jeffries had not come. Her coming seemed all at once to have diminished Louie's composure; it was as if a closed question had been clumsily opened again. "Where do you live? I should like to come and see you," Evie had said, as they had parted at the door of Jim's room; and that was odd, since for quite a number of years Evie Jeffries, had given no sign that she wanted to visit her. Kitty Windus, yes; Miriam Levey, yes; but she had not wanted to see Louie Causton. But she wanted to see Louie now, and had come that afternoon, Louie was now convinced, expressly to see her. Why? Had Jim been talking? Had Kitty and Miriam Levey been talking? Louie did not know. She only knew that she had been settled and at peace and was now so no longer.

And through it all shone an unquenchable recollection—the recollection of how she had once stumbled upon Evie Soames, not in wonderful furs, asking for her lordly husband, but dressed in a skirt and blouse, cheek to cheek in a dark back room with a fancy-stationer's son.

Evie would never forgive her that discovery.

With all the elasticity gone out of her, she resumed the work she had left half-an-hour before.

But as she lay in bed that night in her little flat, Louie ate her heart out again. She hated Evie Jeffries. She had remembered, too, an old, old slander—the slander to know the truth about which Kitty Windus had come to the Nursing Home in Mortlake Road. Was it that that had brought Mrs. Jeffries to the Consolidation now?

Louie tossed and tossed. Oh, she cried vindictively, if it only had been so.... But to have to submit to the indignity of Evie's jealousy and not to be able to give her grounds for it! And Mrs. Jeffries wanted to see her flat! Well, she should be welcome. Louie would hardly be at the trouble to lie about things, but every stick of furniture in this place in which Jim had never set foot might silently lie for her if they would! Would that be to drag Jim in? Well, let him be dragged in; a woman with a husband like Jim, to be jealous! Why, with Louie ready and glad to lose her soul for him, he was the very egotist of faithfulness! He could not be virtuous without damning Louie with his grave and candid looks! She could almost have laughed at him. When all was said, such virtue was a byword, and the story of Joseph a thing for a quiet smile! Then Louie's laugh became a cry aloud, that woke Jimmy. Jimmy went to sleep again, but she was no calmer.

Bitter as spurge was that old story of hers now, and bitterer still the only moral lesson it now appeared to her to have. Oh, no doubt there was a deal to say for their conventional morality, but a pretty moral lesson it was, after all, that you repented of a history with one man only when it forbade a second history with another! And she swore again that that first history should not have stood in her way; more, far more than that was his own headstrong virtue, and perhaps that was not all either. She had been born for him, she knew it; he had had never a secret from her save those large open secrets that scarce a woman shared with a man yet; his hands, that could take life for love, were made to hold her. She knew it in her soul.... But huge as it was, he didn't see it. He allowed a pretty face to blind him to it all. "Oh, come, come!" she had called to him on the only night, of all those nights, when he and she had walked together; and his answer had been to take himself away. When she had kissed his shoulder she had merely kissed the spot where another woman's head had lain.

Oh, if that slander could only have been true!

She looked at, and almost tossed aside unread, a letter that came for her in the morning. Not for a single moment had she slept, and she wanted no letter from Roy—for it was from Roy. Still she might as well read it. She did so.

Billy Izzard was with him; it had come out that Billy knew her, and he wanted to see her. "I've come back for you," the letter said, "and I'm not going to let you go this time. Do write when I can come and see you. Off out now, but do write." She threw it into the fire. Marry Roy? She would far rather commit another sin than such a reparation. The trouble was that she could not commit the sin.

That morning she was sent for by Jim. As she turned the handle of his door she was ready to make a bet with herself about what he wanted her for. She was not mistaken. He wanted to thank her for showing his wife round the day before.

His wife—always and for ever his wife.

"If you feel that you must——" she said, biting her lip with humiliation and passion.

"It's merely——" he rumbled heavily on....

As if she needed to be told what it "merely" was! If he cared to hear it she could tell him what was "merely" the matter with his wife!

"Oh, must you?" she said, quivering under the torture. He was playing nervously with a pen. "Must I what?" he said, not looking up.

"Must you do this?"

He looked up. "Shut the door," he said. "Now——"

She listened to him almost scornfully. Again harping on that informal execution, as if he had been right and not right, and as if it now mattered one straw whether he "told his wife" or not! He was saying something about a doctor; the doctor, Louie gathered, had said she mustn't have another shock; what had Louie—always and for ever Louie—to say to that? Louie clutched at her skirt with both hands.

"Don't you know?" she said, clenching the skirt hard.

"I do not."

"Then ask me again and I'll tell you," she threatened him.

"I do ask you."

Well, if he would have it.... "She's jealous," said Louie.

The smile that stole slowly over his face set her almost beside herself. Even Potiphar's wife was probably not smiled at. Louie cut short the easy words that accompanied the smile.

"Then if she isn't, why does she want to come and see me at my home?" she demanded.

With quite remarkable clumsiness he pretended he had known his wife wanted this, and smiled again. She stamped on the ground.

"My good man——" she broke out wildly....

What she said she did not remember very clearly afterwards. It was spoken less to him than to ease her own breast. With nothing to give her, he still could not hold his tongue nor restrain that smile when she told him his wife was jealous. Jealous?...

Yes, and with a jealousy that could now never pass away! For, out of absences, silences, refusals, virtues, smiles, everything, Louie had, after all, secured something that all the smiling in the world could not take away. She had the secret he had feared to share with his wife. She had the answer to every riddle in his riddle-haunted eyes. His wife had grounds for her jealousy, after all, had she but wit enough to know where to look for them. But she too was hopelessly behind. She too was smelling at cold scents—telephones and visits to flats. She suspected a gross infidelity, and never dreamed of the existence of one so fatally searching that the other would have been a mere incident by comparison with it. Little dullard, how should she? Her conception even of jealousy was as limited as everything else about her; a call or two on the private wire at night, and she was found asking questions at the Consolidation the next day.

And suddenly Louie saw—fool that she had been not to see it before!—why Evie Jeffries wanted to come to her flat. It was not to see the place and its furniture. It was to see Jimmy.

Oh, if her boy could only have had eyes like a young lion!

VI

When Kitty Windus had come to Mortlake Road and had refused to sit down until Louie had told her the truth about the wanton slander that had linked her name with Jim's, Louie had dismissed the matter with amused contempt. But now there seemed something rather terrible in it. Its author's stamping-out notwithstanding, for Evie Jeffries it appeared still to live. What had brought it up anew Louie could not as much as guess, but there it seemed to be.

"So that's it?" she muttered to herself. "In that case I may certainly expect to see you again soon. You won't say anything to your husband; he'd only smile and disbelieve his eyes and ears if you did—his powers that way are really tremendous; but you'll probably go to Miriam Levey, who's rather a gift for these things, and Kitty'll back her up, and you'll make out your case one way or another. Very well. When the water's troubled there's the best fishing. I'm not above certain things now; good gracious, no! I'll find a reason for ringing him up to-night, and if you go to the telephone yourself so much the better. And you'll be round to see me at my flat before very long."

Evie delayed to come, but Louie knew the reason for that. Jim was moving into his great new place in Iddesleigh Gate. That would take a little time. Well, there was no hurry. When she did come Louie would be ready for her.

Did she still hope, if those waters could be sufficiently troubled, for a catch? Was she in her heart now as resolved to wreck the peace of Jim's household as formerly she had been to preserve it? She could hardly have answered the questions herself. It was Evie, not she (she told herself), who was going the right way to make a mess of things; nevertheless, she had only to remember Jim's smile to feel the tigress stretch itself within her. The loved fool! Could he go all lengths for love without thinking that a woman might do the same? Louie could not kill, as he could, smoothly burying the consequences afterwards, but she could do other things; and she was not sure that she couldn't kill too. Ten words, it appeared, would do it. Jim, who did not fear murder, feared those ten words; well, men feared one thing, women another, that was all. She had only to open her mouth where Jim kept his shut.

The only thing was that it did not seem a very sporting thing to do. Jim had taken his risks; she would be taking none. It was not much, perhaps, but it was enough to give her pause.

In the meantime she continued to ring Jim up frequently on the private telephone.

It was on the second Saturday afternoon in April that Evie at last paid her visit. Louie had sent out Rhoda, Jimmy's nurse, for the afternoon, and was herself setting out with the boy for one of their precious jaunts. They were half-way down the four flights of stairs when she heard somebody ascending. She and Evie Jeffries met on the second landing, where the charwoman ceased to whiten the edges of the stairs.

It seemed to Louie that Evie Jeffries must have a sort of lucky-bag of greetings into which to dip. She could hardly have been surprised to meet Louie on Louie's staircase, but she drew a wrong one for all that.

"Well, this is a sur—a pleasure!" she cried. "You see, I promised to come, and here I am! Don't tell me you're just going out!"

"No; we were only going to the South Kensington Museum, and I was in two minds about it. Come up, won't you?" Louie replied.

At first Evie wouldn't hear of it, but even as she spoke she had ascended another step. They went upstairs again, and Louie put her key into the lock. "You'll excuse me a moment, won't you?" she said, as Evie entered. "In there's my sitting-room."

And she herself, turning along the passage, entered her bedroom and took that old study of Billy Izzard's from its paper wrappings. She hung it up on its old nail. If Evie Jeffries wished to see her flat she should see her flat. Then she returned to the front room that looked away over the trees and houses to Earls Court.

"So this," said Evie, as she entered, "is your little boy!"

"Yes, that's Jim. Won't you sit down? I'll put the kettle on and we'll have tea."

She went into the kitchen, filled the tin kettle, and set it on the gas-ring.

Evie was dressed in an exquisite coat and skirt and an expensive and wrong hat; silk linings made whispers whenever she moved; but Louie, who kept her good clothes for the Consolidation, wore the battered old grey felt hat and long grey coat in which she had passed from studio to studio. But she knew that Evie envied her her distinction of motion. Evie's figure was pretty and "stock," charming but with no surprise—that of a demonstrable beauty. And the acquired tones had come into her voice again.

"How ripping up here!" she approved. "Such a splendid—view! I wish we had a view like it in Iddesleigh Gate; but as I told my husband, even money can't buy a view in London. Delightful! Have you the morning sun?"

"That's in my bedroom," said Louie. "How did you come—by car?"

"No; I felt that I needed the walk. Really people will be forgetting how to walk soon. Well, at all events, he's a beautiful boy!"

Louie saw no reason why she should not say, in the simple French which may more or less be assumed to go with large houses and cars, that she preferred that the boy himself should not be told so; and then she went into the kitchen again to smile. She remembered Burnett Minor: "Voo affectay feele!" she murmured softly. Then she made tea.

"I suppose you're not quite settled yet?" she said, returning with the tray.

"Settled! Why, it will take us months!" Evie purred.

"Of course. It seems very odd to talk over the telephone, though, to a place you've never seen. Sugar? Is this place at all like what you imagined?"

Again came the ready-made answer: "Oh, it's really quite too delightful!" It was a pity, Louie thought, that Mrs. Jeffries had not had the advantage of a few minutes' talk with Mrs. Lovenant-Smith before coming to see her. The Lady-in-Charge at Rainham Parva might have warned her.

But Louie knew that already her very chairs and mats and brown-papered walls were silently whispering to Evie Jeffries. She might talk of Iddesleigh Gate, but she was thinking of nothing less than of Iddesleigh Gate. Perhaps she had been reassured in the matter of Jimmy's eyes, which were as blue as Roy's, but her own eyes were taking in everything for all that. Let them. Louie wondered whether, did she turn her back for a few minutes, her visitor would question the child.

"The Amaranth Room?" she presently interrupted Evie's flow to say. "Have you really a room called that? How lovely it sounds!"

"Nearly fifty feet long, my husband says; why, it has to have three large fireplaces, as well as the radiators, but of course there's steam-heat all through the house. It's delicious, not to walk into cold patches all of a sudden. And all the windows on one side are double, so that the place is perfectly quiet. You must come some time. Of course," she took herself up, "our other house was quite a poky place; my husband never really settled there; but at Iddesleigh Gate, he says, he can really stretch himself."

Louie meditated for a moment. Then: "What's really been the matter with him?" she asked. She knew that Evie would probably not believe she didn't know; for that reason it was better to ask.

But she got no information. It was overstrain, Evie replied lightly, and then on the top of that he'd slipped one night and caught his head on the corner of a fender. He'd slipped because he'd been really fagged out, what with starting the Consolidation and one thing and another. "But he looks all right now, don't you think?" Evie asked.

"Perfectly, I should say, from the little I see of him."

"Of course you mostly do Sir Julius's work, don't you?"

"Mostly."

"It must be great fun for you, being taken out by Sir Julius sometimes. My husband told me that."

"Quite amusing."

"Miss Levey was never taken out like that!"

"No? Have you seen her lately?"

But again Louie got little information. Included in what she did get, however, was a lie. Evie reported that Miss Levey, now at some Women's Emancipation League or other with Kitty Windus, had actually been going to write to Louie to suggest that she, Louie, should apply for her old place. Louie gave a little nod. Of course Miriam Levey, rather than own to defeat, would pretend that she had left the Consolidation of her own accord. Louie rose.

"But perhaps you'd like to see my place?" she said. "Not that I think you'll find it very amusing. But you can see it if you like."

"I should love it! Is Jimmy coming? Do you know, Jimmy, I've got a little boy like you, but not nearly as big?"

"Has he got a helmet like mine?" Jimmy demanded.

"No; but I think I shall have to get him one."

"You stay here, Jimmy," said his mother; and she led the way to the kitchen.

Evie praised the kitchen and its meagre appointments, and was then shown the bathroom. "It hasn't a crystal bath," Louie said, "but it does to wash in." She lingered in the bathroom a little; she was thinking of another bath and certain old jokes about brown-paper parcels. Then, first showing Evie the bedroom that had been Kitty's, she passed to her own room at the back.

Against the wall on the left lay Jimmy's bed; her own was across the room, with its head under the break of the mansard roof. The little built-out window, from the glass sides of which rows of chimney-pots could be seen, faced the door, and over the fireplace on the right, full in the light, hung Billy's study. It was the second thing on which Evie's eyes rested. Louie was careful not to look at it.

For in that place at any rate she was going to strike; the rest might fall out afterwards as it would. As she turned away to pat Jimmy's pillow she was suddenly fighting white; the little creature had come for it and should have it. And she should have it swiftly and without warning. Even as Louie had turned her back her heart had given a leap....

For up to that moment it had been always possible that Jim had not spoken of his intrusion into Billy's studio that evening; but there was no doubt now! Jim—or perhaps Billy Izzard—had told her. Probably Billy. Probably Billy first, and then, seeing she already knew, Jim. All at once there rushed upon Louie, as she passed from Jimmy's bed to her own and smoothed the coverlet of that also, what had happened later that same evening, when her arms had supported a collapsing Jim in a Swan Walk doorway and she had passionately called him: "Come, come! Come, come!"

She spoke quietly; quietness was so much more destructive.

"This is where I get the morning sun. But it's very windy. The wind blew that picture you're looking at down the other day." Then, without either pause or change of tone: "By the way, that's what you came to see, isn't it—that and my boy?"

Simultaneously with her blow she was commenting to herself: "That's good-bye to you, Sir Julius; she'll see I don't come back to the Consolidation after that; will you have Miss Levey back again, or will you try her friend Miss Windus? I don't think you'll offer Miss Windus an—er—increase of wages. As for me, I suppose I can sit again; nothing matters now. Or there's a plainer way still——"

The next moment she had called sharply: "Go away, Jimmy, till I call for you! Go and look out of the window for Rhoda!"

Then she turned and faced the woman who had taken two quick, running steps towards her. Insolently she smiled into her eyes.

"That was it, wasn't it?" she said.

Mrs. Jeffries did not fight white. The blood had thronged to her head until her very lips seemed swollen; Miss Levey could hardly have spoken more thickly. She spoke, too, in a passionate ellipsis than which Louie's own five words did not go more straight to the heart of the matter.

"Oh, you would if you could—I've known that a long time!" she cried. "Wouldn't you just—rather! You'd do it if it was only to give me one for myself! I know you."

Louie thought she rather liked her for making a fight of it. She still smiled. "Then that was it?" she said.

Evie flushed even more deeply. "You didn't suppose I didn't know all about that absurd meeting, did you?" she said, with a still darker flush.

"Dear me, no. I've known for weeks that you 'knew'—if we mean the same thing. Perhaps we don't, though. Anyway, I can quite understand your wanting to see for yourself. Miss Levey can't tell you everything."

Evie's inability to speak for mere fury was so evident that Louie, after watching her for a moment, continued:

"As for that picture, naturally I wanted to keep it. I'm sure you'll see that for yourself."

Here Evie flamed. "'Naturally!'" she broke out. Louie gave an almost humorous shrug.

"Well, surely it's natural?"

"Natural!... As if his coming in wasn't the merest accident!"

"Oh, I know that; but what are you here for then? And now that you have been and seen, what can you possibly do about it?"

Evie's lips seemed as thick as if a bee had stung them. She broke out again.

"'It!'—I like your 'it,' Miss Causton or Mrs. Causton or whatever you call yourself!"

Louie coolly smoothed the folds of her blouse. "By 'it,' I mean, of course, my loving your husband," she said. "As you guessed, I knew that you knew about that picture. But it's really a much older thing than that! I don't quite know how old; while you were still engaged to somebody else—as old as that anyhow. And as it's purely my affair, and even he can't stop it, I wonder what you can possibly do!—I'm 'Miss' Causton, by the way."

Louie had almost a genius for these last words that could be taken up; she smiled again as Evie, taking them up, said: "Oh, are you!"

"Well, I don't think I need be longer than I like, but that's neither here nor there. The important thing at present is whether you were wise to come to-day or not. I wonder whether you'd let me give you a piece of advice?"

And that, as Evie still stood speechless with rage, might be described as the end of the first round. There was a long pause during which the two women stood looking at one another. Then the second round began, with a rapid exchange of half sentences.

"Advice! Thanking you very much for your kindness——"

"Oh, please don't raise your voice; they aren't double windows here."

"Advice is cheap."

"Far from it, believe me."

"You common——"

"Sssh, ssh, ssh! Your husband wasn't above asking my advice——"

"I'll take very good care——"

"Please—there are other people in these flats."

"Well, is noise anything new here?" said Evie grossly.

"Oh, you really shouldn't say those things!"

And again they fell back, as it were, for breath. It was Louie who presently resumed.

"I don't in the least know why I should want to advise you," she went on. "I'd no intention of doing so when you came into this room, and to be frank I still half hope you won't take the advice. But you'll please yourself about that. It's this. Don't be a little fool. Go home, and don't tell your husband you've seen me at all. If you do you'll make a sad mistake. You say advice is cheap; well, this isn't; it's fearfully dear. It's not the first time I've tried to help you, and I really haven't strength to do it any more. No, don't try to think of fresh names to call me either; already you've called me common and told me that the tenants here are used to hearing angry wives, and one can have too much of that. So go home, and say nothing to your husband about where you've been. Believe me, it'll be quite the best."

It did in truth cost her more, far more, than she had intended to pay. The greater fool she, she told herself, but—she gave a quick, defiant glance round the bedroom, as if her eyes sought somebody who dared to meddle in her affairs. She would be a fool if she wished; who should stop her? This jealous little scold had fair warning now; let her take it and go while there was yet time. Louie had all but spoken her former fiancÉ's name once; with much more provocation she might forget herself and involve Jim too in a catastrophe of ten little words; and she wanted to do the sporting thing after all. Let Jim's wife take her fill of that canvas of Billy's, then, and go. Her eyes were glued to it now. As she looked Louie exulted; it had been so—precisely so; not all Evie Jeffries's looking could alter that fact....

But suddenly, as if even in this gratification and triumph lurked a peril best avoided, Louie strode to the canvas, took it from its nail, and set it on the floor by the little fireplace with its face to the wall. She had felt the tigress stretch again. To put that thing out of sight was the safest thing to do. She turned to Evie again.

"Please go," she said. ("Yes, mother's coming in a minute, Jimmy.) You see, he's calling me. Forgive my turning you out like this, but do, do go, and don't tell your husband where you've been. Good-bye."

But Evie Jeffries seemed to suspect that Louie was merely "coming it over her" with something indefinable, essential, not to be acquired. After all it was she, this shabby, grey-eyed woman, who wrote shorthand for a weekly wage, and herself, Mrs. James Herbert Jeffries, who lived in the mansion in Iddesleigh Gate. Perhaps she felt herself challenged; at any rate she plunged her hand into her lucky-bag once more.

"Oh, there's no need for such a hurry," she said frigidly. "For one thing, I'm a little particular about who I take my advice from. You needn't think I don't see you're just shutting me up?"

Louie was almost hushing, soothing. "Then let me shut you up. You've seen all you came to see; if there's anything else you want to know, ask me, quite quickly——"

And Louie, in her eagerness to get rid of her and to remove herself from danger, almost gladly submitted to what Evie said next.

"Oh, of course, if you've—an appointment," she said, with a toss.

"Yes, I've an appointment—you understand," she answered, with a little shepherding movement of her hands.

But the next moment that too had turned into something else.

"Oh, you little fool!" Louie broke out, suddenly seeing. "You don't suppose I'm trying to get you out of the way so that I can meet him, do you? Good gracious, woman, he's never set foot in this place in his life, and I'll see he never does! Perhaps I wanted you to think he had—I don't know what I thought—with one and another of you I'm getting almost past thinking—but that's the truth anyway! Now are you satisfied? Or have you got the idea so thoroughly into your stupid little head that nothing will shake it? If you're going to spend your Saturday afternoons going round to every place you think might possibly——"

But the denial counted for nothing. Evie turned haughtily.

"Who's making the noise now? And why should I believe you? I knew before I came you'd say that——"

"Oh, how you try me!... I do say that. There's nothing else to say. Do you think if it was any other way I shouldn't boast of it, to you or anybody else? Why, how can you know so little of him—not to speak of myself——"

"You needn't talk as if you hadn't already had the cheek to tell me you loved him!"

"Did I? Upon my soul, I sometimes don't know whether I do or not! Say I don't—say I lied—say I sometimes almost hate him as much as I do you and you me."

"Oh, very likely, the grapes being sour," Evie scoffed.

"Then if they're sour——? What more do you want? Isn't that enough? And isn't it more than enough that I let you stand there and tell me so? Oh, I'm doing my best to warn you—you'll make a great mistake if you make me try to get him!" She stamped. "Won't you go?"

Evie too stamped. "Oh yes, I'll go, and so will you, I promise you—from Pall Mall——"

"Anything you like—only go——"

But as Evie took a step towards the door a little accident turned Louie suddenly as white as paper. Billy's study leaned against the wall; Evie's skirt or foot caught it as she passed; and the canvas fell. Evie gave a short laugh and pushed it with her shoe.

The dear symbol, nay, the very evidence of so many dreamings, that poor thing of wasted smiles and sighs and tears, the pearl from the heart of the oyster-grey——

A kick of her rival's shoe was treatment good enough for it——

It was as if the hives of her own breasts and the heart beneath them had been trodden on.

Louie stepped slowly forward. "No, stop," she said.

She stood for a moment looking down at the picture; then she spoke slowly.

"You were quite right to come," she said. "You have reason to be jealous."

Evie affected not to hear, but she heard. Louie continued:

"A moment ago I told you not to tell him you'd been here. Now I want you to tell him. He may even be expecting it. You see we have spoken of it, he and I."

Evie Jeffries seemed about to say something, but "Just one moment," said Louie quietly——

She placed the picture against the wall again, face outwards. She did not display it as a taunt now; it had served its turn. As if Evie's looks had cheapened it, she no longer wanted it. She stood looking at it.

"It was the last time I sat," she murmured to herself.

Even that pale shadow of a bridal was to be taken from her.

Well, let it go.

This time it was her own foot that kicked the canvas aside; then like a flash she turned—Louie at her deadliest.

"I suppose you're aware you've lost him, whether he knows it yet or not?" she demanded truculently.

Again she was grateful to Evie that she stiffened up against her. Evie smiled.

"Oh, that way—'whether he knows it or not'—nobody minds that kind of losing! That wasn't what you were trying to make me believe a few minutes ago. Thank you very much for the tea, not forgetting the advice," she went on, "and if I might return the compliment, I should like to give you a piece of advice too. You say you could get married if you like; I'd jump at that if I were you! You see, there's your boy. Quite a well-behaved little fellow he seems—quite a superior child—and now that I've seen for myself, I'm perfectly satisfied, thank you!"

"Then," said Louie, advancing, "I'm going to spoil your satisfaction. Listen to me." Her eyes were like saucers of ice. "You've lost your husband. I'm not going to tell you how, but I'll tell you how you can find out. You can tell him what he wouldn't believe when I told him—that you're jealous. You've reason; ask him what it is. If he doesn't tell you, he daren't; if he does—ck!—it's all up between you. Do you suppose," she said slowly, "that you're the kind of woman men tell things to? You, who can neither trust him nor be trusted by him? You, who spy on him when his back's turned? You, who listen while a miserable little Jewess makes mischief for you—for I guess Miriam Levey sent you here? You think you love him? Look at me, I say"—she rapped out the words like a command—"listen, and I'll tell you my idea of loving a man! I've messed my life; if you were anything but what you are you'd know that if you wanted to hurt me your way wouldn't be to point at my little boy and look round my bedroom as if you expected to find pipes and overcoats there! Oh, that's not the way! The way would be to let me see what a perfect marriage could be; there might be tears in my eyes then! But what's this you show me instead? Oh, I know what your marriage is without telling. It would take you and a woman to make a wife for a man! And what would mine have been if I hadn't thrown my chance away? What should I have said if I'd seen what you think you've seen? Listen! I should have said: 'Go, if you like; find a woman if you can whose love's like mine; search the earth for her; I give you leave, and I shall be waiting for you, just the same, when you come back and say there isn't one!' But had you thought of that? Not you! At a word you're off, asking whether this and that's true, because you don't trust him; and so he gives his trust to somebody else! That's what you've lost—and you don't even miss it, you know so little of love!"

Evie had fallen back against the wall, a little intimidated by her vehemence. She did not understand, but she seemed to apprehend that there was something she did not understand. Louie broke out anew.

"You know love! And when and how did you learn it, pray? As you learned your shorthand and things (oh, you're trying hard to forget you ever knew them!) at that place in Holborn? Why, you failed in your petty little examinations there; do you think love's easier? Something you get out of a text-book and answer a paper on? Your husband might know if you don't! He knew just what those other lessons were worth, but he doesn't seem to know that loving has a genius too—that one in a million has it as a gift and the others mimic it as you're mimicking people in your dress and talk now! And you call me common—me, who told your husband long ago what his only, only chance was! Oh, I mustn't say any more or I shall say everything! And you toss your head and say: 'Nobody minds that kind of losing!' That's your idea; that's what you really think! Why, your mind wants a window as badly as that little dark back room at your Business College.... Oh, it maddens me, the sheer waste! A necklace of love—pearls—and good gracious, a bit of cheap glass in the middle of it! Yes, I mean you."

She was walking rapidly up and down; she struck the rail of Jimmy's cot with her hand as she passed. Evie, cowed, watched her from the wall. Louie stopped before her.

"What do you do for him?" she said bitterly. "What do you give him? What do you bear for him, suffer for him? Don't whimper—tell me—you've made pretty free with me—put that handkerchief away and tell me——"

But instead of putting the handkerchief away, Evie burst into loud sobs. Louie watched her remorselessly. Tears, of course—no doubt that was the way she managed Jim——

"That's no good with me," she said harshly. "I want to know what you do for your husband besides following him about and asking questions about him."

Evie's hand moved as if for a chair. There was none. She lifted her head, walked across the room, and fell across Louie's bed. Louie still watched her unmoved.

"Well?" she demanded again, after a quarter of a minute.

Muffled in the bedclothes, Evie's voice came.

"I give him all—all I—have. You talk as if—as if—I'd no right—to be on the earth at all."

"Well?"

"Oh, you do—you do! How—how can I give him more—than I've got? Oh, you think you know, but you don't—you don't know what I've gone through—you've never had that horrible morning—when I was to have been married—and I never expected Jeff to propose, but he did——"

"Oh, for goodness' sake, get up!" Louie cried.

"He did—one day—and I said No at first, but he caught hold of me.... And even then I was jealous about Kitty—I know I'm jealous—but he told me afterwards that I needn't be jealous of poor Kitty because he'd only done it because he thought he couldn't have me—I know I'm jealous—it hurts sometimes so that I can only cry and cry——"

Louie hadn't wanted this at all. Again she cried: "Oh, get up!" but Evie continued to sob.

"And then when Jeff saw you—that night—at Billy's—it was worse than ever, but I kept it from him. I'm not like you, Louie—it's no good my telling myself I don't mind—even though I knew it was all an accident it was like a knife——"

"Oh, don't lie there like that!" Louie muttered.

"And then Miriam Levey reminded me of that thing Archie had said—but he's dead now—and I know it was absurd, but I did think he liked you. You've—such ways, you see—I expect you've been a governess or something in swell houses—I've got to learn them too, now, but Jeff says I'm really very quick at it——"

Louie was pacing the floor now, but more slowly and with downhung head. This was the very last thing she had wanted. More than ever she hated this unresisting piece of pulp; but strike again she could not; no, not with Evie's soul as it were a naked picture for her to set her foot upon. And unless she did strike it was now quite, quite final. To take it lying down! Gladly she would have goaded her into a fresh show of resistance; contemptuously she would have told her to stand up and fight; but the child—Louie felt her to be a child, and herself a faded woman—was merely beyond all decency exposed. Louie only wanted to cover her up again as quickly as possible—her confessions, her abjectness, her appalling artlessnesses, her humiliating appeals. She was beginning to sob once more.

"Oh, don't go on like that; do get up and pull yourself together!" Louie snapped.

"I do love him—I haven't anything else to give him—except my life—he could have that—you couldn't give him more than that——"

"I could stop blubbering for him," said Louie curtly, resuming her walk.

Yes, it was final. Evie had overcome; Louie now backed out of the whole affair. If Jim liked to tell her of his own accord, well and good; it still seemed the only way out; but what was the good even then? Evie Jeffries would no more acquire love as Louie understood it than she would ever acquire the nous to preside without betrayals at Jim's table at Iddesleigh Gate. And if Evie had lost Jim, so had Louie. By her silence she was relinquishing him now. She saw his image recede, slowly, slowly, as if it had been indeed that ship of her fancy, outward bound, her own vessel already condemned for breaking up. Yes, the ship was drawing away. The eyes of her spirit tired of watching it; surely now she might turn them elsewhere; but no—there it was still, very small, leaning, no doubt, to a brisk breeze, but hardly appearing to move.... No, it was not gone even yet; that sudden anguished searching for it was but a trick of the eyes; it was still there—a speck——

And it had only needed six words: "James Herbert Jeffries killed Archie Merridew."

Suddenly Louie herself sank to the floor by Jimmy's cot. Evie heard her sinking. She rose from the bed and ran to her. But Louie cried aloud and put up her hand.

"For God's sake don't touch me—go now—and say nothing."

The touch of Evie Jeffries would have been more than she could have borne.

"Mother, there is a gentleman!"

It was Jimmy's voice outside the door.

Slowly Louie rose to her feet. "Very well," she called shakily; "talk to him till I come. Please go at once," she added to Evie.

Evie began: "I'm sorry I said——"

"Oh, do you want me to strike you?"

"Can't I—do anything—for you?"

"Go!"

She heard the outer door close behind Evie Jeffries. By that time her eyes were straining at a wide and empty horizon....

VII

§a

What followed when, after a few minutes during which Louie bathed her face in the bathroom, she entered her sitting-room again, fell mercifully flat. Any visit would have been an anti-climax; a visit now from Roy—it was Roy—was even welcome for that reason. If she must see him, best get it over.

He was sitting on a rush-seated chair with Jimmy between his knees. Jimmy was playing with his watch. Save that the rims of his stolid porcelain-blue eyes were pinkish, as if with suppressed tears, he had not greatly changed. He wore a braided morning-coat; his silk hat, stick and gloves lay on another chair. His watch slipped from his boy's hand and dangled by its chain as he rose. His voice carried Louie instantly back to the carpenter's shed at Rainham Parva.

"It's me, you see, Louie; here I am, like a bad penny, always turning up."

Louie spoke listlessly. "How are you? I'll get you some tea."

A minute later, with a "May I come in here?" he had followed her into the kitchen. He merely got in her way, if she could be said, in her complete exhaustion, to have a way at all. She was cutting bread and butter.

"Louie, old girl," he said piteously over the bread-board, "why didn't you—tell a fellow?"

Louie did not answer. Then Roy chirped up a little, as if something might now, past all discussion, be taken for granted.

"Well, this settles it," he said. "Clinches it entirely. You know what I mean."

Louie did know. "Just take the kettle off, will you?" she said.

"So you see that's settled—clinched," said Roy, quite bustling. "Right you are. The only question now is; how soon can you pack up."

"We'll talk about it presently, if there's anything to say. There isn't, though. Will you carry the tray in?"

Jimmy ran straight to his knee again. "May I give him some jam?" said Roy; and then he added to the boy: "Oh, come, don't mess yourself up with it like that!" Louie remembered his account of the accident with the centre-board: "Jam and all the lot!" but she did not smile.

"Rhoda will be here in a few minutes, then I'll have a short walk with you," she said. "I've nothing to say, though."

Presently Rhoda did come in, and Louie put on her hat and old grey coat. They went out and walked slowly across Eelbrook Common towards Walham Green. There she told Roy that his return could make no difference whatever. "Don't talk such stuff, Louie," he said; "sit down." They sat down on a bench on the side of the common past which the District Railway runs and talked.

The air rang with the shouts of poorly clad children at their Saturday afternoon play; the common was a-crawl with urchins. Into Roy's honest, statue-like eyes tears had come; none came into Louie's. She only shook her head.

"You're only lacerating me," she said.

"But, Louie——"

"You want to lacerate me?"

"But—the little chap——" Roy said presently, with a gulp. "Will you tell a fellow how you manage?"

That Louie did not mind doing, more or less. "And now I must go back," she said, rising.

"I'll walk back a bit of the way with you. I'm not going to let you go like this."

At the little drinking-fountain she stopped. "Don't make it harder," she said. He had been indicating the rabble of children.

"But look at 'em, poor little beggars!" he said. "Dash it all, I'm not just blowing off—I could do such lots for him—he could ride—and shoot—and fish—and I've a corking little pony at grass now." He mentioned these things one after the other, slowly, as they occurred to him.

Louie groaned inwardly, but aloud she said: "Please don't come any farther. Good-bye."

"But I may come again? You see, I jolly well know I could persuade you."

"N-o——"

"I shall, though—you bet," Roy announced.

She left him, wondering whether it would have made any difference at all had he, in asking her to marry him, told her once, even once, that he loved her.

But she did not return home. Instead, she walked past the block of flats, crossed Putney Bridge, and sought her old Nursing Home in Mortlake Road. As a drunkard might pant for a drink, so now in her extremity she wanted to hear gaiety and laughter and talk. Though she paid for it in prostration afterwards, she felt that without some such intermission she could never get through the night. And to-morrow was that dead day, Sunday. Further than that she did not see; beyond the anodyne of an ordinary human laugh she did not inquire. It seemed to her a matter of the last moment to herself that Miss Dot and Miss Cora should be at home; if they were not, she felt that she must walk straight into a public-house, as a man might, and get herself something to drink.

But Miss Cora and Miss Dot were at home; they had just come in from a matinÉe. They made an onslaught on Louie. Had she seen the piece? Oh, the funniest thing! They really had had some luck at the theatre at last! The last time it had been a slum piece, all heartstrings and gutter-snipes; and the time before that—would Louie believe it!—just when they had expected to see frocks and dancing and suchlike, the curtain had gone up on a dentist's parlour! Two half-crowns for seats in the pit for that! It was almost like paying money to go and see another Nursing Home!

"But give the poor girl some tea—what are we thinking of!" said Miss Cora.

"No, thanks—I've given two people tea this afternoon already," said Louie. "Tell me about the play."

And, both speaking at once, they told her about the play—such a frock as Ellaline Terriss had worn!—an e-nor-mous pink hat, pink like a rabbit's ear, and a frock, chiffon over pink satin.

Ah! That was better!

"But where's my bonnie boy?" Miss Cora demanded.

"Oh, let's show her the new one, the little Crowley baby!"

The little Crowley baby was brought in....

"May I invite myself to supper?" Louie asked by-and-by.

"Oh, do stop!"

"Then give me some stout or something. I'm not sleeping very well."

"Oh, we'll see that's all right——"

And when, at ten o'clock, Louie left, it was with a sleeping preparation in her pocket. She took it in bed. It did its work. Half Sunday had passed when next she awoke.

On the Sunday afternoon she went with Jimmy and Rhoda to Bishops Park; then, packing them off home, she crossed the bridge again and took the bus to Buck's. At Buck's she again stayed until ten, and she smiled as, on the way home again, she remembered the little party to which Chaff had once taken her, pigtail and all. If Chaff had had a little party that night she would have invited herself to it; it would have been something to do. Although it was half-past eleven when she reached her own door she was not in the least tired; had she not slept until well after midday? She walked back to Putney Bridge again. There a man spoke to her. She wondered what he would have said had she stopped; it would have been amusing to know. She felt that she had not had enough amusement. She wished she could have gone back to the Business School in Holborn again. That had been amusing. Mr. Mackie had been very amusing. One of his songs, he had said, that about the Gorgonzola Cheese, never failed to create merriment.

She hummed as much as she could remember of the air of it as she walked, and took two more of Miss Cora's sleeping-tablets before going to bed.

She found, too, an entirely unexpected amount of amusement at the Consolidation on the Monday morning. Not that everything was not much as usual; the routine was the same; but a quite comic spirit seemed to pervade the whole place. Lacking a Mr. Mackie, Sir Julius, dapper and perfect in his aplomb, who had thought of asking her to be his mistress but had found a more profitable use to put her to, seemed somehow as funny as needs be; she wondered she had not noticed it before. It happened that Mr. Stonor had to rebuke one of the telephone girls that morning; there was diversion in the way in which the girl tossed her dolly-capped head and told him that she would talk to her "boys" if she liked. Quite right; that was the way to take things, as a joke. And Mr. Whitlock was portentously funny over a nought or so that had strayed into a pile of figures; and the glazed screen that marked Louie's superiority to the other girls in the same room seemed inanimately funny, and Jim himself was funny, when you came to think of it, sitting invisible there in his room with people coming and going all the time, as if the earth would have ceased to revolve on her axis or the sun have omitted to rise if Jim had not rung bells and jotted his initials on his bits of paper. And funnier than everything else was the fact that Louie should be there at all. She laughed outright when, at nine o'clock that night (she had been kept on account of some urgent joke or other), she stepped from the upholstered lift and out into Pall Mall.

Again she wished that Chaff had had a little party somewhere. Jim, she understood from Mr. Stonor, was giving a party presently, not a little one, but a large, probably a screamingly funny, one. But its humour would probably be lost on Jim. Jim did not always see jokes; that was where Jim had made the mistake; he needed somebody to point them out to him. His wife, being part of the comedy herself, naturally could not do so; she cried when she should have laughed; she had no "kick," no "buck," in her. It was a pity, for Jim needed these things, and ought to have married a woman who had them. Well, it was rather late, but not too late for Louie to go into a shilling gallery somewhere. To-morrow, if she could get away early, she would go up to Camden Town and see Billy. Billy was a joke too, spending whole, real days in making artificial coloured shapes on canvases or solemnly scratching his copper plates. One of the best things Billy had ever done a woman had humorously kicked aside with her foot. That showed what these things were worth in the big, big world. Of course a sense of humour was really a sense of proportion. The dreadful lack of it showed when people magnified trifles so. Yes, she would go and see Billy to-morrow. To-night, the theatre gallery.

She found Billy on the following evening, still etching, the humorous fellow, but amusingly grave too. Perhaps he had heard, or guessed, something from Roy. He was dissolving the ground from a plate; Louie wondered what the curiously sweet-smelling fluid he was using was; and then she remembered. She had smelt that same smell when Jimmy had been born—which event also, by the way, had been the consequence of a lark. She remembered, too, the wonderful, releasing sleep that heavy-smelling stuff had given her. It might be rather a useful thing to know where to find that stuff; it was necessary to Louie's enjoyment of the world and its humour that she should sleep at night. It struck her as a very happy chance that chloroform should be used in the practice of etching. She admitted that it was rather a shame to steal from Billy again, but she felt that she now needed that wonderful, releasing sleep even more than when Jimmy had been born.

An hour later she left Billy's with the ribbed blue bottle in her pocket.

The remainder of the week also was gay; so was the next week, though perhaps with a slightly diminishing gaiety. But the level was restored again when Roy once more turned up at her flat, again on a Saturday afternoon. Really she could have laughed, as they say, fit to split. Roy, who seemed to think that you could ask a woman to marry you without the—formality, call it—of telling her you loved her! It was not for Louie to spoil the sport by pointing out the inessential omission. Not that she hesitated at all now; she had only to think of how it might have read in the paper: "At Saint So-and-So's, on such and such a date, by a Reverend Statue, assisted by another Reverend Effigy, a Tanagra Figure, to a trodden-on Painting by Billy Izzard," etc., etc. Oh no. That wasn't loving——

There was no doubt that Roy loved Jimmy, however; and that was perhaps a little more serious. He had handed in his papers; he could provide for Jimmy; there was riding, and shooting, and fishing, and the corking little pony; but ... it was impossible, of course. Jimmy was Louie's and nobody else's. If Jimmy must play on Saturday afternoons with the rabble on Eelbrook Common, well, he must; Louie would do all for him that she could. It was a pity—especially about the pony. It disturbed Louie a little. It disturbed her, in fact, so much that that night she remembered something she had forgotten about for ten days and more—the blue ribbed bottle she had stolen from Billy. But as she had left it in her drawer at the Consolidation she had to sleep as best she could without it. Perhaps it was just as well. It was not a good habit. She wondered whether Billy had missed the bottle; she would go up again and see, taking that old painting with her. That would square accounts a little. Certainly it was a shame to loot Billy like that.

She went up to Billy's with the study. Billy received it absently. And she was glad that Billy had a code, for he was grave again, and seemed all but on the point of talking seriously to her, code or none. But it blew over. He asked her whether she'd noticed him with a bottle of chloroform one night; he'd lost one; stupid thing to be careless about; must be somewhere; had Louie seen him with it, cleaning a plate?——

"No," said Louie.

"Well, it may turn up. Thanks for the canvas. To tell you the truth I rather wanted it. Merely as painting it's—knuk!" Billy made a delectable little foreign gesture.

"I'm no judge of things as painting," said Louie. "And—I say—Billy——"

"What?"

"I don't know that I haven't changed my mind about not sitting—if you asked me very nicely——"

But Billy looked gravely at her again. "Oh, it doesn't matter. I'd rather you didn't. I think I can manage. You'd do far better——"

He looked hard at her, but the code held.

"To do what?" said Louie.

"Well, not to sit," said Billy, turning away.

Louie felt ridiculously touched; nevertheless, much as she liked his loyalty, she wasn't going to talk about Roy. "Thanks, Bill," she said simply. "You're a good sort." And there the matter dropped. Neither for Billy nor for anybody else did she ever sit again.

It seemed strange that so slight a thing as an indisposition of Mr. Stonor should obscure the mock-sun of Louie's gaiety as if a vapour had crept across it; but so it was. Occasionally urgent messages were taken to Iddesleigh Gate at night; usually Mr. Stonor took them; but one day Mr. Stonor left at lunch-time and did not come back that day. Sir Julius himself, who had had dinner sent in that night from a restaurant, sent for Louie and gave her certain papers and instructions. As soon as she learned the errand she asked whether nobody else could go instead. She invented an improbable engagement.

"I'm sorry," Sir Julius said, "but I want Whitlock—I shall have to wait here myself till you come back. If you could go, and give them to Mr. Jeffries himself—nobody else——" That was as near as Sir Julius ever came to a direct command.

So, as Evie Jeffries had seen Louie's home, Louie was now to see hers.

She went reluctantly, by bus, changing at the bottom of Park Lane. For days she had not seen Jim; she did not want to see him now. Therefore, though go she must, she would not sit down; she would not lift her veil; she would be in and out of his house again as quickly as ever she could. She passed the Marble Arch, and at Lancaster Gate got down and walked. She reached Jim's vast and tomblike house.

At the word "Consolidation" the man who opened the door said: "This way, please," and led her along a low-lighted hall, round a staircase the outspread double wings of which resembled some huge alighting architectural bird, and along a narrower passage to the library. At the touch of a switch the room broke into a softly masked glow of light. "Please to sit down," said the servant; but Louie stood by the great writing-table, looking towards the door. Evie had taken stock of her dwelling; Louie looked only towards the door of Jim's library.

Then, as the door was opened, she pushed up her veil after all. Jim came in.

He placed a chair for her; she still refused to sit. She continued to stand even when it appeared that the papers she had brought would require some examination. As she stood, a bell, not unlike that of a muffled telephone, sounded for a moment and then ceased. It was followed by a tap on the door.

"Come in," said Jim, without looking up.

Evie Jeffries entered, dressed as if for a State ball.

Even had Louie not seen her face, the touch of her hand would have told her what had happened. Evie was back again exactly where she had been; the only difference was that she now hated Louie the more that she had abased herself before her. Many times on that other Saturday afternoon Louie had begged Evie to go; now she longed to fly herself. After another minute Jim put it into her power to do so. He rose and returned the signed papers.

"Thank you," he said, and added, turning to Evie, "I don't know whether Miss Causton's had supper?"

Evie's face lighted up as artificially as if there too a switch had turned up masked lights.

"Yes; won't you let me have them lay a tray for you, 'Miss' Causton? It won't be any trouble," she said.

"No, thank you," said Louie. "Please don't come to the door, Mr. Jeffries."

He came, however.

"Good-night," he said, as the door was held open for her to pass out.

"Good-night," said Louie.

She remembered afterwards that she noticed, out in Oxford Street again, a sandwichman bearing an illuminated board with the announcement of some concert or entertainment upon it. Pasted across the device was a strip of paper with the words "To night" upon it. The date was the sixteenth of May. At midday on the day following, Louie, coming out of Mr. Whitlock's room, saw Jim advancing as if to come in. He saw her, stared hard at her for a moment, paused irresolutely, and then turned abruptly and walked away again. She watched his back, shaped like a church-door, but bowed as if with a load too great for him, disappear in the direction of his own room. He had made no attempt to conceal the deliberate avoidance. She half expected, though she knew not why, that he would send for her presently. He did not. She was infinitely glad. Something, she was perfectly sure, had happened between him and his wife. It was the first time he had not sought her aid. Had he, now that it was too late, told her? Had he realised that it was too late to tell her? Had he, realising this, determined to take his last risk and to tell her nevertheless? Or had something happened that had at last unsealed his eyes so that he now saw with a clearness as merciless as that of Louie herself?

Louie could not tell. She only saw his face again, the face of a man suddenly old as he realised his defeat, and his disappearing back, hunched under a burden that was crushing him at the last.

§b

"If I were you, Miss Causton, I should leave early to-night," said Mr. Whitlock that afternoon.

Louie looked up inquiringly from her desk.

"Oh, if you want to make it a matter of conscience! But Mr. Jeffries is giving a party to-night, and both Sir Julius and I will be leaving early."

He nodded pleasantly as he dropped his hint, and left her. Louie resumed her work.

It was a report of phosphate deposits, but it had been worked over before and needed little attention; or at all events it got little. At five o'clock Louie gathered the sheets together and put them into the drawer of her table. As she did so some object at the back of the drawer knocked. She thrust in her hand. It was the forgotten bottle of chloroform.

"I'd better throw that down the basin," Louie muttered.

"I think, Mrs. Jeffries, that you and Roy between you put me a little beside myself for a day or two. Much better not to have things like that lying about; to have 'em's sometimes to use 'em. I'll throw it away now."

But as she was rising, one of the telephone girls brought her a cup of tea and a biscuit, and she closed the drawer again. The girl began to talk. She was Ivy Warner, the operator who would talk to her "boys" over the telephone if she wanted. Louie, as a matter of fact, always admired the skill with which she did this. A yard away not a word would be audible, and yet Miss Warner would be carrying on a flirtation in Brighton or Bournemouth under the eye of Mr. Stonor himself.

"Well, how's Harold?" said Louie, smiling over her cup of tea.

"Oh, not at all pleased with himself; backed three winners to-day, one at thirty to one, a gift; like to see him? He's coming up this evening," Miss Warner replied. "I'd a chin with him a quarter of an hour ago; dinner at seven-thirty, at the Troc; no steak-and-fried and a small dark lager when a thirty-to-one creeps home! He's bringing a friend, too; a dasher, Harold says; he's almost afraid to introduce him; and Daisy says she really must give her steady a show to-night. Know anybody?"

Louie thought for a moment. It was a thing she had never done before. She gave Ivy a sidelong look. Again she had the hunger to go somewhere, to see lights, hear music, smell the cigarettes of men.

"Do you care to take me?" she said.

Ivy was surprised. "You?"

"Oh, not if I should spoil sport——"

"Rather not! Do come! What a lark! I'll get on to Harold again now. You really mean it?"

"Yes."

"Good egg!" cried Ivy, glad to make up her party and to improve her relations with her business superior at the same time. "I didn't really want Daisy, you see. Of course they do talk loud at the Troc, but Daisy's just a tiny bit ... well, a perfect stranger had the cheek to come up to our table and speak to her the last time——"

Ivy ran jubilantly off to ring up Harold again.

Louie told herself it was a stupid thing to do; she was getting into the habit of loitering about late at night, heedless of Jimmy. But she had promised, and would go. If she didn't she would only be mopishly thinking, and, after all, she would be no more out of place with Harold's dashing friend than Evie Jeffries would be in another place much about the same time. Perhaps the dasher for Evie and Jim's guests for herself would have been more fitting, but no matter. She would be a dasher too. She wondered how Ivy was describing her dashing self to Harold over the telephone.

At seven o'clock she made herself ready and left the Consolidation with Ivy.

She retained no very clear recollection afterwards of the gaieties of that evening, but the little she did remember arrested her a little. She had a confused impression of the lights and tables and pilastered walls of the Trocadero as of a bright beckoning vista, stretching before her as the white road stretches before the knapsacked and stout-booted walker. She knew that many girls went that way.... The air was heavy with the smell of coffee, smoke, dishes, scent; Harold's friend was a Hebrew "killer," and reminded her of Miss Levey; noisily he claimed the privilege, which Harold noisily disputed, of paying for everything; and the waiter contemptuously accepted a tip of a sovereign from him. Perhaps he was the same cavalier who had resented Daisy's loudness; at all events he appeared to find in Louie's quietness another—or perhaps the same—meaning; and Louie had to move her chair and to change her attitude at the table. Afterwards they went to the Alhambra; it was Ivy who cried out at the sight of two cabs and refused to go unless they all went together. At the Alhambra Louie was afraid she was rather a wet blanket; she declined to "take a walk round" and remained seated in her stall; but Harold's friend was fickle as well as dashing, for by-and-by she had a glimpse of him with another lady, who had not dined with them at the Trocadero. She wondered how Evie Jeffries had got on—or "got off," to use an expression of Kitty Windus's.

Suddenly—perhaps it was this thought of Evie elsewhere that did it—she got up, sought the cloakroom, and walked out of the place. She went home, once more quietly and steadily thinking of that vista of lights and cigar smoke and laughing mouths and gilded pilasters—the way so many girls went.

The row she expected with Ivy in the morning was not a moment delayed. It began in the lift in which they both happened to ascend together.

"Good-morning," said Ivy stiffly. "I hope you got home in good time last night."

Louie waited until the liftman had clashed the doors to behind them; then, "I'd a headache," she said.

"Well, perhaps it's better than having one in the morning," said Ivy, more icily still. "All the same, there is such a thing as playing the game when you go out with people."

"I'm sorry. I oughtn't to have come," said Louie, walking with the angry girl to the telephone exchange, where the lights on the great switchboard came and went like the sparks at the back of a gate. They were coming and going with great rapidity that morning.

"Oh, much obliged for your company, I'm sure," Ivy broke out, "but——"

"Sssh!" came from a girl who stretched the rubber worms.

"Sssh yourself, Daisy Dawson—time you knew how to speak into a phone by this time!" snapped Ivy.

But another and a louder "Sssh!" came from another girl, and suddenly Mr. Stonor's head appeared in the doorway.

"Quiet there!" he rapped out, and withdrew his head again.

"Sssh, Ivy—haven't you heard?" Daisy Dawson said softly.

Ivy's own voice dropped. "What?" she asked quickly.

"About Mr. Jeffries."

"No—what?"

Mr. Stonor came in again—but not before Louie had heard Daisy whisper the word "dead."

Suddenly she remembered the face of the liftman. She clutched Mr. Stonor's arm. He looked at her. There was no need to ask.

Dead!

Slowly she walked to her own table behind the screen.

The place was at once busier and more hushed than usual. Presently Mr. Whitlock passed. Mr. Whitlock was thirty-five; he looked fifty. Louie only asked him a single question: "Is it in the papers?" He nodded and passed on. She sought a messenger.

It was on the right-hand middle page. It had happened at one o'clock in the morning; cerebral hÆmorrhage. That very evening he had given a dinner-party; followed a short interview with Sir Peregrine Campbell, one of the guests; but Mr. Robson, of the Board of Trade, had declined to be seen. There would be no inquest. Heartfelt sympathy was extended to his widow. Half-a-column of "career" closed the announcement. The early edition of the evening paper for which she sent out had it all over again.

Dead!

Another absence!

Slowly she turned the paper and began at the beginning again.

Jim dead!

That night Louie fetched Jimmy from his cot into her own bed. It was not, she felt, for comfort for herself; she had a strange feeling that she ought to be comforting Jimmy. Jimmy slept, but, her eyes alternately very widely open and very tightly closed in the dark, she whispered to him.

"Well, we've got to look after ourselves now," she whispered to the sleeping child. "I don't think we care to go and see him, do we? I daresay she wouldn't refuse it, but we won't go. That was his wife, who said she'd a little boy like you, and of course we're all very sorry for her. She did give him all she had; she said she'd die for him; but of course that's only a way people have of speaking when they mean they love somebody very much. Nobody wants her to die for him really; that would only be two dead instead of one; and she won't actually die.... And she'd a sad thing happen once before. Nobody ever knew about that really except me and him; she didn't know; if she did she might die really then. People have to be careful, they say, when they've once had a terrible shock. It's rather funny though, Jimmy, that mother shouldn't feel very much of a shock. Of course I didn't expect it, but as soon as it happened it seemed as if it had been bound to happen. That's queer—and I don't know that I wouldn't have preferred the shock."

She continued her curious consolation of the sleeping boy:

"Poor Jimmy—poor mother! He looked beaten yesterday—done—but I didn't think.... One never does think till afterwards.... Ah, but mother did, once, a long time ago! Mother danced with him once, and knew then—and the next time she saw him Jimmy was quite a big boy. If she could only have seen him a few times in between, she doesn't know what she could have done, but she would have done something, and then by-and-by he would have blessed her for it—she's sure, quite sure he would.... And there she was, with some terrible people at a music hall——"

She choked a little.

Even had it been proposed to her, she did not think she would have gone to see Jim. That was another woman's affair; Louie's part in him had nothing to do with what remained now. Not that she was so absurd as to tell herself she had lost nothing; even when it is only yours to look at, or perhaps to put your arms about just once, a body counts for something; but the other woman had had nothing but that. "Nothing but" was perhaps a queer way of putting it; for that "nothing but" Louie might perhaps have given all the rest; but all the same it was not very much her business now. Her business now, like the other woman's, was to jog on just the same, the one in her empty mansion, the other one it didn't much matter where. Again she whispered to Jimmy.

"How thankful I am that I didn't tell her—something! Oh, I don't think I could bear her to die for him as she said she would! And I do hope he's not been so foolish as to—leave anything about; anything that might tell her, I mean; she can't bear what I can bear. But he wouldn't. He wouldn't cover it all up so cleverly to go and uncover it himself. I always knew it would happen if that insect got in his way; Jim wouldn't think twice about it, except how to make himself safe.... Was it Kitty Windus who told me that about him—about his father having been an English merchant captain and his mother a Corsican woman he found dancing in a sailors' cafÉ in Marseilles? If it wasn't Kitty I dreamed it; mother's done a most foolish lot of dreaming; but it must have been Kitty. They say they do that kind of thing in Corsica. I shall never know.... Well, it doesn't matter.... Poor little Jimmy...."

She deliberately tried herself, to see whether she was capable of emotion about him. She seemed to be quite incapable. "I'm simply callous," she thought.... She tried several days later, on the day of his funeral; the words she repeated to herself had no meaning for her; "gone," was merely a thing of four letters, "never" one of five. The word "absence" she quite failed to understand. She heard that Mrs. Jeffries was prostrated, but quite as well as could be expected in the circumstances. Perhaps Mrs. Jeffries too was repeating the words "gone" and "never." Louie wondered whether she would marry again. It would not surprise her.

Well, if Evie Jeffries could live, Louie could live.

A piece of news, however, which she had from Billy Izzard one night—this was three weeks later, but her stony insensibility had not changed—filled her, she could not have told why, with a quite different disquietude. It appeared that Billy had felt himself permitted to call on Mrs. Jeffries, and had found her (so he told Louie) busy with her husband's private papers. Sir Julius also had been there, to advise if advice was necessary; and Sir Julius had been of opinion that the painful task would be more quickly over if Mrs. Jeffries would have a number of papers that were written in shorthand transcribed by a clerk, if a trustworthy one could be found. "In fact, he mentioned your name," said Billy. But it appeared that Mrs. Jeffries knew some shorthand, had other reasons, and so forth. She had refused to have the papers transcribed. Naturally they had not said much with Billy there, who, indeed, had not stayed many minutes; but he had gathered that the papers formed some sort of a journal.

Louie felt her flesh grow queerly crisp. This, by the way, was in a little restaurant not far from the Palace Theatre. Louie had had three consecutive nights at home, and felt that a fourth would kill her. She and Billy were going to the Palace afterwards.

"A journal?" she said slowly.

"Well, Pepper rather thought a novel of some sort; I'd a talk with him afterwards; but I suppose he only knows what Mrs. Jeffries tells him. It wouldn't surprise me in the least that poor old Jeff dabbled a bit in that sort of thing. I'm quite sure he'd have made a painter. One of the big sort he was, the Titian, Leonardo, Cellini sort—the big men, who can take an art or so in their stride."

"What made Sir Julius think it might be a novel?" Louie hoped that her new agitation did not show.

"My dear girl, you know as much about it as I do."

"And it was in shorthand?" she demanded.

"Yes."

"His own?"

"I'm sure I can't say. It was in his desk though. Why?"

"And you say Mrs. Jeffries is reading it herself?"

"Well, when Pepper suggested you—and a Miss Levey, I remember, whoever she is——"

"Miriam Levey? Yes?" Louie said, with a jerk.

Billy looked hard at her. "What's the matter?" he said abruptly. "You're as queer as Mrs. Jeffries herself was about it."

"She was queer? How, queer?"

"Oh, I don't know. How can one describe things like that—just impressions one gets?"

"Did she strike you as queer because she'd perhaps read some of it?"

"Well, I understand it was private——"

"You mean she must have read some of it to find that out?"

"I suppose so."

Again Louie had that curious crawling of her flesh. She hesitated for a moment; then, slowly:

"What sort of terms are you on with Mrs. Jeffries, Billy?"

Billy stared. "Oh, quite all right—I don't understand——"

"Have you any influence over her?"

"What sort of influence?"

Louie hesitated again. After all, it might be only a fear. She went on. "Say influence enough to advise her about reading that journal, or novel, or whatever it is?"

"Lord, no!" said Billy. "I was his friend, hardly hers, you see."

"Well, if it could be put as a matter of friendship with him?" Louie was speaking almost feverishly now.

"I wish I knew exactly what you meant," said Billy.

"Order me another cup of coffee. That's what I can't tell you, because I don't know myself. But let me ask another question. Do you happen to know whether there are any real names in this thing, whatever it is?"

"Really, I——"

"Just a moment. I'll tell you why I asked. If this is a journal, and has names of people in it, the chances are mine's there."

Billy was quick enough. He nodded. "I see; at least I think I see. You mean about his coming in that night and Mrs. Jeffries possibly not liking it? Well, to tell the truth I don't think she did much. I could have bitten my tongue out when I'd told her; but I suppose everybody doesn't look on these things quite as we do. You mean in a word—excuse me for putting it rather stupidly—that she's jealous and thinks she can find out the truth? Supposing there was any 'truth' to find out, I mean?"

"That's the idea. Of course there was no 'truth.'"

"Well? Why not let her discover that and make her happy, poor thing? You see, he was her husband."

Louie winced, but continued. "That's all right as far as it goes; but if there's one name there are probably others."

Billy looked sharply at her. "Other women? Jeffries? Don't you believe it!"

"I didn't say women."

"What then?"

"I can't tell you. And perhaps I'm altogether wrong. But if I'm not wrong, Billy," she said earnestly, "and you've any interest in Mrs. Jeffries at all—say interest enough to want to spare her a shock—she oughtn't to be allowed to read that journal—always supposing it is a journal."

Billy gave a short laugh. "Really, Louie! Is this the Surrey or Sadlers Wells?... You're not serious, are you? Of course it's bound to be painful for her at the best, but she's getting on very well—better than we could have hoped."

Louie made a little despairing gesture. "Well, I can't tell you any more."

"Well, if it's as important as all that, why don't you tell her?"

"I couldn't do that either. Look here, Billy, couldn't you find out about this for me?"

"Oh, dash it all—how can I?"

The saucer of Louie's coffee cup was full of ashes; she added another butt and reached for Billy's case. She looked Billy full in the eyes as he struck a match for her.

"Do you go much to Iddlesleigh Gate?"

"Well, just at present, you see——"

"I mean, could you go? Where does all this take place? In that library? (Yes, I've been once.)"

"Yes. At least that's where we were that night."

Still Louie looked steadily into his eyes. "Now this really is Surrey and Sadlers Wells," she said. "Could you get those papers out of her way—anyhow—so that she doesn't read them?"

Billy twinkled a little. "It takes a woman to do these things, Louie."

"Suppose without asking any questions, if you did I'd—marry Roy?" After all, to marry Roy would be no worse than anything else now.

The twinkle disappeared. Billy was grave again.

"I'd like you to marry Roy, Louie."

"Well ... is it a bet?"

But Billy only shook his head. This was all very well at the Surrey and Sadlers Wells, but——

"It's a physical impossibility," he said. "And if it wasn't, I wouldn't."

"That's final?" said Louie, looking into his eyes for the last time.

"My dear girl——"

Louie rose. "All right. Then we may as well get across to the Palace and see Marie Lloyd."

Could she have said more? She did not see that she could. The chance loomed tremendously large now that Jim had been fool enough to write things after all, and perhaps his wife was reading that journal, if it was a journal, even then——

Louie could not stop her—no power on earth could stop her. What Jim had evidently not told her during his life she would read for herself now that he had gone.

He would have done better to tell her.

But there: perhaps it was not a journal——