IN the room overlooking the Abbey were spent many dark and ominous hours. By direction of Nurse Selton, Poppy presented herself at No. 10 one dreary October day, and while she stood knocking at the door of the mean house, the grey, sad shadows of Westminster fell across her, and were not lifted by day or night.

Each part of London has its own peculiar atmosphere. Chelsea is cheerful; Kensington reserved; Bayswater extremely refined; Bloomsbury vulgar and pathetic—and a number of other things. Westminster is essentially sad—sad with a noble, stately sadness.

"It cannot grieve as them that have no hope," but its high towers and spires, its statues, cloisters, yards, hospitals, and ancient walls—all have an aloof air of haunting melancholy. Beautiful but unsmiling, Westminster dreams always and sadly of the great, noble past.

So, when Poppy came into it that October day, its brooding spirit enfolded her, and all her life after she was never quite able to lift from her heart the sad, lovely hand of Westminster.

At night, when she could open her little casement-window and gaze out at the profile of the Abbey, and hear sometimes the bells of "sweet St. Margaret's," life went kindly with her. Before leaving Hunter Street, at the last moment, a fair thing had happened. The editor of The Cornfield had sent her a cheque for eight pounds seventeen shillings, in payment for a story which she had written in Sophie Cornell's bungalow and discovered of late at the bottom of a trunk. It was a story full of sunshine and gay, gibing wit, and the editor asked her for more work in the same vein. She had none, indeed, to send, but the request put her in good heart for the future. She essayed to write a little from day to day in the upper chamber; but the atmosphere was wrong for the romantic sun-bitten tales of her own land that seethed within her, and yet evaded her pen when she sought to fasten them to paper. Also, though she had but to close her eyes to see Africa lying bathed in spring sunshine, and to remember every detail of scents and sounds, it broke her heart to write of these things in a room dim with fog and full of a piercing smell that found its way from the kitchen up four flights of stairs and through closed doors—the smell of bloaters.

She brightened her room as much as possible with flowers, and taking down Mrs. Selton's tawdry pictures, had the walls bare, except for a blue print of Watts's Hope—a statuesque-limbed woman, with blindfolded eyes, who sits at the top of the world sounding the last string of a broken viol. On a day when hope was bright in her, Poppy had bought the picture at a little shop in Victoria Street, and now she counted it one of her dearest possessions. Always it comforted and cheered her on.

Days came when she needed all the comfort she could get. There were other women in the house who were apparently in the same case as herself, but they were haggard, furtive creatures, holding converse with none, shutting doors swiftly at the approach of anyone but Nurse Selton, creeping out for air under the cloak of night.

Sometimes the woman in the adjoining room moaned all night, railing at Fate and God that she should have been brought to this pass.

Once through an open door Poppy heard haggling going on about the premium to be paid with a baby that was to be "adopted."

The sordidness of life, and the meanness of human nature, pressed around her. It was hard to keep ideals in such an atmosphere; hard to flaunt the green flag of love and hope, when there were so many hands eager to pull it down and trample it in the mire. A joyful spirit seemed out of place here. To the people she had got among, the thing that she thought wonderful and lovely was a curse and a bane! The mean house in the back street and the common-minded people seemed in a conspiracy to make her feel low, and shameful, when she wished only to be proud and happy.

"This must be part of the terror that comes of breaking the moral law," she whispered to herself. "One's act can bring one into contact with sordid people, and squalor and vice—one may become degraded and soiled in spite of oneself." She looked around her with hunted eyes. "There is nothing fine or noble anywhere here, except Watts's picture!" she thought; but when she opened her window and saw the grand old Abbey, she could think it no longer. There it lay in the gloom, grand and silent, standing for great, proud things: the long pile with the hunch at one end of it and at the other the stately twin pinnacles facing Palace Yard, where Raleigh's head fell, and where London goes rolling by to East and to West.

Yes: it stood for all high and noble things and thoughts! All grand ideals! Nothing squalid there, or shameful! Surely it belonged to her—belonged to everyone who loved it, and loved what it meant. But did it? Was she cut off from it because—? She drew in her breath, and thought for a long time with closed eyes and clasped hands.

"... I suppose morality is one of the high things—and I am not moral. I am one of the Magdalenes of the earth now!... whoever knows, will call me an immoral woman! I think I am only a mistaken one. I can see that now, thinking not of myself, but of my son to be. I should, if I had no moral instincts, at least have thought of consequences to my child! Well-brought-up girls are trained to think of these things, I suppose. But I was not well brought up—I was never brought up at all. I was a child of Nature. A poppy, blowing and flaming in the field—and plucked. If I had been anything else I should not have been in the garden that night at a time when well-brought-up girls were in bed! And I should have flown at the first sound of danger—but I didn't. Not because I did not recognise danger; but because I did recognise something I had been looking for all my life—Love. And I put out both arms and embraced it. Now it seems revealed to me that I should not have done this ... I should have fenced and fended ... guarded myself ... given nothing ... until he had asked for me and taken me, before all the world ... and made a nest for me somewhere away from the squalor of the world where no begriming thoughts could touch me and smirch the mother of his son. Then I suppose the Abbey would have been for me too!—--"

She twisted her lips and flung out her fingers.

"And I wouldn't change a thing that is done. Not for all the world could give would I forget or have undone that radiant hour!... And yet ... and yet ... how I should love the nest for my child ... the peace and fine honour of a wife's bed to lay his son upon! Oh! why does life tear the hearts of women in half like this?" She rested her head on her hands and shed passionate tears for herself and for all women like her. At last she said:

"Good-night, old Abbey! You are mine all the same—mine because, moral or immoral, I love the things you stand for. You cannot rob even bad people of the love of beauty. And no one can rob me of the peace you have put into my heart night after night."

At last illness descended upon her. She had often known torment of mind, now she knew torment of body, and her mind did not suffer at all; but was possessed of a kind of exultation that supported and refreshed her through terrible gaps of time.

Nurse Selton came in often, but the girl preferred to be alone. Most of the day was spent between Hope over the mantelpiece and the casement-window. Often she thought of the native women in her own land, who, when the time comes to bring forth, go quietly away and make a soft green bed in some sheltered place, and there suffer in silence and alone; then, after a few hours, return as quietly to every-day work and go serenely on with life, the new-born child slung behind the shoulders. The thought appealed to Poppy. She said:

"That is the way I should have borne my son if I had stayed in Africa ... out in the air—with the sun shining. But oh! these terrible walls that shut one in!... and without—cold, fog, mud!"

When evening fell, sickly and grey-green, she opened her casement-window and leaned upon its sill. The roar of London heard through the fog was like the dull boom of the breakers on the Durban back beach. Far away, the sky above Trafalgar Square was spasmodically lit by electric advertisements.

In the street below, a woman's raucous voice pathetically shrieked: