Septimus had never seen a woman faint before. At first he thought Emmy was
dead, and rubbed agonized hands together like a fly. When he realized what
had happened, he produced a large jack-knife which he always carried in his
trousers pocket--for the purpose, he explained, of sharpening pencils--and
offered it to Zora with the vague idea that the first aid to fainting women
consisted in cutting their stay-laces. Zora rebuked him for futility, and
bade him ring the bell for the maid.
It was all very sudden. The scene had been one that of late had grown so
familiar: Zora and Septimus poring over world itineraries, the latter full
of ineffectual suggestion and irrelevant reminiscence, and Emmy reading by
the fire. On this occasion it was the _Globe_ newspaper which Septimus, who
had spent the day in London on an unexecuted errand to his publisher, had
brought back with him. Evening papers being luxuries in Nunsmere, he had
hidden it carefully from Wiggleswick, in order to present it to the ladies.
Suddenly there was a rustle and a slither by the fire-place, and Emmy, in a
dead faint, hung over the arm of the chair. In her hand she grasped the
outer sheet of the paper. The inner sheet, according to the untidy ways of
women with newspapers, lay discarded on the floor.
With Septimus's help Zora and the maid carried her to the sofa; they opened
the window and gave her smelling salts. Septimus anxiously desired to be
assured that she was not dying, and Zora thanked heaven that her mother
had gone to bed. Presently Emmy recovered consciousness.
"I must have fainted," she said in a whisper.
"Yes, dear," said Zora, kneeling by her side. "Are you better?"
Emmy stared past Zora at something unseen and terrifying.
"It was foolish. The heat, I suppose. Mr. Sypher's burning board." She
turned an appealing glance to Septimus. "Did I say anything silly?"
When he told her that she had slipped over the arm of the chair without a
word, she looked relieved and closed her eyes. As soon as she had revived
sufficiently she allowed herself to be led up-stairs; but before going she
pressed Septimus's hand with feverish significance.
Even to so inexperienced a mind as his the glance and the hand-shake
conveyed a sense of trust, suggested dimly a reason for the fainting fit.
Once more he stood alone and perplexed in the little drawing-room. Once
more he passed his long fingers through his Struwel Peter hair and looked
about the room for inspiration. Finding none, he mechanically gathered up
the two parts of the newspaper, with a man's instinct for tidiness in
printed matter, and smoothed out the crumples that Emmy's hand had made on
the outer sheet. Whilst doing so, a paragraph met his eye, causing him to
stare helplessly at the paper.
It was the announcement of the marriage of Mordaunt Prince at the British
Consulate in Naples.
The unutterable perfidy of man! For the first time in his guileless life
Septimus met it face to face. To read of human depravity in the police
reports is one thing, to see it fall like a black shadow across one's life
is another. It horrified him. Mordaunt Prince had committed the
unforgivable sin. He had stolen a girl's love, and basely, meanly, he had
slunk off, deceiving her to the last. To Septimus the lover who kissed and
rode away had ever appeared a despicable figure of romance. The fellow who
did it in real life proclaimed himself an unconscionable scoundrel. The
memory of Emmy's forget-me-not blue eyes turning into sapphires as she sang
the villain's praises smote him. He clenched his fists and put to
incoherent use his limited vocabulary of anathema. Then fearing, in his
excited state, to meet Zora, lest he should betray the miserable secret, he
stuffed the newspaper into his pocket, and crept out of the house.
Before his own fire he puzzled over the problem. Something must be done.
But what? Hale Mordaunt Prince from his bride's arms and bring him penitent
to Nunsmere? What would be the good of that, seeing that polygamy is not
openly sanctioned by Western civilization? Proceed to Naples and chastise
him? That were better. The monster deserved it. But how are men chastised?
Septimus had no experience. He reflected vaguely that people did this sort
of thing with a horsewhip. He speculated on the kind of horsewhip that
would be necessary. A hunting crop with no lash would not be more effective
than an ordinary walking stick. With a lash it would be cumbrous, unless he
kept at an undignified distance and flicked at his victim as the
ring-master in the circus flicks at the clown. Perhaps horsewhips for this
particular purpose could be obtained from the Army and Navy Stores. It
should be about three feet long, flexible and tapering to a point.
Unconsciously his inventive faculty began to work. When he had devised an
adequate instrument, made of fine steel wires ingeniously plaited, he
awoke, somewhat shame-facedly, to the commonplaces of the original problem.
What was to be done?
He pondered for some hours, then he sighed and sought consolation in his
bassoon; but after a few bars of "Annie Laurie" he put the unedifying
instrument back in its corner and went out for a walk. It was a starry
night of frost. Nunsmere lay silent as Bethlehem; and a star hung low in
the east. Far away across the common gleamed one solitary light in the
vicarage windows; the Vicar, good gentleman, finishing his unruffled sermon
while his parish slept. Otherwise darkness spread over everything save the
sky. Not a creature on the road, not a creature on the common, not even the
lame donkey. Incredibly distant the faint sound of a railway whistle
intensified the stillness. Septimus's own footsteps on the crisp grass rang
loud in his ears. Yet both stillness and darkness felt companionable, in
harmony with the starlit dimness of the man's mind. His soul was having its
adventure while mystery filled the outer air. He walked on, wrapped in the
nebulous fantasies which passed with him for thought, heedless, as he
always was, of the flight of time. Once he halted by the edge of the pond,
and, sitting on a bench, lit and smoked his pipe until the cold forced him
to rise. With an instinctive desire to hear some earthly sound, he picked
up a stone and threw it into the water. He shivered at the ghostly splash
and moved away, himself an ineffectual ghost wandering aimlessly in the
night.
The Vicar's lamp had been extinguished long ago. A faint breeze sprang up.
The star sank lower in the sky. Suddenly, as he turned back from the road
to cross the common for the hundredth time, he became aware that he was
not alone. Footsteps rather felt than heard were in front of him. He
pressed forward and peered through the darkness, and finally made out a dim
form some thirty yards away. Idly he followed and soon recognized the
figure as that of a woman hurrying fast. Why a woman should be crossing
Nunsmere Common at four o'clock in the morning passed his power of
conjecture. She was going neither to nor from the doctor, whose house lay
behind the vicarage on the right. All at once her objective became clear to
him. He thought of the splash of the stone. She was making straight for the
pond. He hastened his pace, came up within a few yards of her and then
stopped dead. It was Emmy. He recognized the zibeline toque and coat edged
with the same fur which she often wore. She carried something in her hand,
he could not tell what.
She went on, unconscious of his nearness. He followed her, horror-stricken.
Emmy, a new Ophelia, was about to seek a watery grave for herself and her
love sorrow. Again came the problem which in moments of emergency Septimus
had never learned to solve. What should he do? Across the agony of his mind
shot a feeling of horrible indelicacy in thrusting himself upon a woman at
such a moment. He was half tempted to turn back and leave her to the
sanctity of her grief. But again the splash echoed in his ears and again he
shivered. The water was so black and cold. And what could he say to Zora?
The thought lashed his pace to sudden swiftness and Emmy turned with a
little scream of fear.
"Who are you?"
"It's I, Septimus," he stammered, taking hold of his cap. "For God's sake,
don't do it."
"I shall. Go away. How dare you spy on me?"
She stood and faced him, and her features were just discernible in the dim
starlight. Anger rang in her voice. She stamped her foot.
"How dare you?"
"I haven't been spying on you," he explained. "I only recognized you a
couple of minutes ago. I was walking about--taking a stroll before
breakfast, you know."
"Oh!" she said, stonily.
"I'm dreadfully sorry to have intruded upon you," he continued, twirling
his cap nervously in his fingers while the breeze played through his
upstanding hair. "I didn't mean to--but I couldn't stand by and let you do
it. I couldn't, really."
"Do what?" she asked, still angry. Septimus did not know that beneath the
fur-lined jacket her heart was thumping madly.
"Drown yourself," said Septimus.
"In the pond?" she laughed hysterically. "In three feet of water? How do
you think I was going to manage it?"
Septimus reflected. He had not thought of the pond's inadequate depth.
"You might have lain down at the bottom until it was all over," he remarked
in perfect seriousness. "I once heard of a servant girl who drowned herself
in a basin of water."
Emmy turned impatiently and, walking on, waved him away; but he accompanied
her mechanically.
"Oh, don't follow me," she cried in a queer voice. "Leave me alone, for
God's sake. I'm not going to commit suicide. I wish to heaven I had the
pluck."
"But if you're not going to do that, why on earth are you here?"
"I'm taking a stroll before breakfast--just like yourself. Why am I here?
If you really want to know," she added defiantly, "I'm going to London--by
the early train from Hensham--the milk train. See, I'm respectable. I have
my luggage." She swung something in the dark before him and he perceived
that it was a handbag. "Now are you satisfied? Or do you think I was going
to take a handkerchief and a powder puff into the other world with me? I'm
just simply going to London--nothing more."
"But it's a seven-mile walk to Hensham."
She made no reply, but quickened her pace. Septimus, in a whirl of doubt
and puzzledom, walked by her side, still holding his cap in his hand. Even
the intelligence of the local policeman would have connected her astounding
appearance on the common with the announcement in the _Globe_. He took that
for granted. But if she were not about to destroy herself, why this
untimely flight to London? Why walk seven miles in wintry darkness when she
could have caught a train at Ripstead (a mile away) a few hours later, in
orthodox comfort? It was a mystery, a tragic and perplexing mystery.
They passed by the pond in silence, crossed the common and reached the main
road.
"I wish I knew what to do, Emmy," he said at last. "I hate forcing my
company upon you, and yet I feel I should be doing wrong to leave you
unprotected. You see, I should not be able to face Zora."
"You had better face her as late as possible," she replied quickly.
"Perhaps you had better walk to the station with me. Would you?"
"It would ease my mind."
"All right. Only, for God's sake, don't chatter. I don't want you of all
people to get on my nerves."
"Let me carry your bag," said Septimus, "and you had better have my
stick."
The process of transference brought to his consciousness the fact of his
bareheadedness. He put on his cap and they trudged along the road like
gipsy man and wife, saying not a word to each other. For two miles they
proceeded thus, sometimes in utter blackness when the road wound between
thick oak plantations, sometimes in the lesser dimness of the open when it
passed by the rolling fields; and not a sign of human life disturbed the
country stillness. Then they turned into the London road and passed through
a village. Lights were in the windows. One cottage door stood open. A shaft
of light streamed across Emmy's face, and Septimus caught a glimpse of
drawn and haggard misery. They went on for another mile. Now and then a
laborer passed them with an unsurprised greeting. A milkcart rattled by and
then all was silence again. Gradually the stars lost brilliance.
All of a sudden, at the foot of a rise crowned by a cottage looming black
against the sky, Emmy broke down and cast herself on a heap of stones by
the side of the road, a helpless bundle of sobs and incoherent
lamentations. She could bear it no longer. Why had he not spoken to her?
She could go no further. She wished she were dead. What was going to become
of her? How could he walk by her side saying nothing, like a dumb jailer?
He had better go back to Nunsmere and leave her to die by the wayside. It
was all she asked of Heaven.
"Oh, God have pity on me," she moaned, and rocked herself to and fro.
Septimus stood for a time tongue-tied in acute distress. This was his first
adventure in knight-errantry and he had served before neither as page nor
squire. He would have given his head to say the unknown words that might
comfort her. All he could do was to pat her on the shoulder in a futile way
and bid her not to cry, which, as all the world knows, is the greatest
encouragement to further shedding of tears a weeping woman can have. Emmy
sobbed more bitterly than ever. Once more on that night of agonizing
dubiety, what was to be done? He looked round desperately for guidance,
and, as he looked, a light appeared in the window of the hilltop cottage.
"Perhaps," said he, "if I knock at the door up there, they can give you a
glass of milk. Or a cup of tea," he added, brightening with the glow of
inspiration. "Or they may be able to let you lie down for a while."
But Emmy shook her head miserably. Milk, tea, recumbent luxury were as
nothing to her. Neither poppy nor mandragora (or words to that effect)
could give her ease again. And she couldn't walk four miles, and she must
catch the morning train.
"If you'll tell me what I can do," said Septimus, "I'll do it."
A creaky rumble was heard in the distance and presently they made out a
cart coming slowly down the hill. Septimus had another brilliant idea.
"Let me put you into that and take you back to Nunsmere."
She sprang to her feet and clutched his arm.
"Never. Never, do you hear? I couldn't bear it. Mother, Zora--I couldn't
see them again. Last night they nearly drove me into hysterics. What do you
suppose I came out for at this hour, if it wasn't to avoid meeting them?
Let us go on. If I die on the road, so much the better."
"Perhaps," said Septimus, "I could carry you."
She softened, linked her arm in his, and almost laughed, as they started up
the hill.
"What a good fellow you are, and I've been behaving like a beast. Anyone
but you would have worried me with questions--and small wonder. But you
haven't even asked me--"
"Hush," said Septimus. "I know. I saw the paragraph in the newspaper. Don't
let's talk of it. Let us talk of something else. Do you like honey? The
Great Bear put me in mind. Wiggleswick wants to keep bees. I tell him, if
he does, I'll keep a bear. He could eat the honey, you see. And then I
could teach him to dance by playing the bassoon to him. Perhaps he would
like the bassoon," he continued, after a pause, in his wistful way. "Nobody
else does."
"If you had it with you now, I should love it for your sake," said Emmy
with a sob.
"If you would take my advice and rest in the cottage, I could send for it,"
he replied unsmilingly.
"We must catch the train," said Emmy.
In Wirley, half a mile further, folks were stirring. A cart laden with
market produce waited by a cottage door for the driver who stood swallowing
his final cup of tea. A bare-headed child clung round his leg, an attendant
Hebe. The wanderers halted.
"If the other cart could have taken us back to Nunsmere," said Septimus,
with the air of a man who has arrived at Truth, "this one can carry us to
the station."
And so it fell out. The men made Emmy as comfortable as could be among the
cabbages, with some sacks for rugs, and there she lay drowsy with pain and
weariness until they came to the end of their journey.
A gas-light or two accentuated the murky dismalness of the little station.
Emmy sank exhausted on a bench in the booking hail, numb with cold, and too
woebegone to think of her hair, which straggled limply from beneath the
zibeline toque. Septimus went to the booking office and asked for two
first-class tickets to London. When he joined her again she was crying
softly.
"You're coming with me? It is good of you."
"I'm responsible for you to Zora."
A shaft of jealousy shot through her tears.
"You always think of Zora."
"To think of her," replied Septimus, vaguely allusive, "is a liberal
education."
Emmy shrugged her shoulders. She was not of the type that makes paragons
out of her own sex, and she had also a sisterly knowledge of Zora
unharmonious with Septimus's poetic conception. But she felt too miserable
to argue. She asked him the time.
At last the train came in. There was a great rattling of milk-cans on the
gloomy platform, and various slouching shapes entered third-class
carriages. The wanderers had the only first-class compartment to
themselves. It struck cold and noisome, like a peculiarly unaired
charnel-house. A feeble lamp, whose effect was dimmed by the swishing dirty
oil in the bottom of the globe, gave a pretense at illumination. The guard
passing by the window turned his lantern on them and paused for a wondering
moment. Were they a runaway couple? If so, thought he, they had arrived at
quick repentance. As they looked too dismal for tips, he concerned himself
with them no more. The train started. Emmy shook with cold, in spite of
her fur-lined jacket. Septimus took off his overcoat and spread it over
their two bodies as they huddled together for warmth. After a while her
head drooped on his shoulder and she slept, while Septimus sucked his empty
pipe, not daring to light it lest he should disturb her slumbers. For the
same reason he forbore to change his original awkward attitude, and in
consequence suffered agonies of pins and needles. To have a solid young
woman asleep in your arms is not the romantic pleasure the poets make out;
for comfort, she might just as well stand on your head. Also, as Emmy
unconsciously drew the overcoat away from him, one side of his body
perished with cold; and a dinner suit is not warm enough for traveling on a
frosty morning.
The thought of his dinner jacket reminded him of his puzzledom. What were
Emmy and himself doing in that galley of a railway carriage when they might
have been so much more comfortable in their own beds in Nunsmere? It was an
impenetrable mystery to which the sleeping girl who was causing him such
acute though cheerfully borne discomfort alone had the key. In vain did he
propound to himself the theory that such speculation betokened an
indelicate mind; in vain did he ask himself with unwonted severity what
business it was of his; in vain did he try to hitch his thoughts to Patent
Safety Railway Carriages, which were giving him a great deal of trouble; in
vain did he try to sleep. The question haunted him. So much so that when
Emmy awoke and rubbed her eyes, and in some confusion apologized for the
use to which she had put his shoulder, he was almost ashamed to look her in
the face.
"What are you going to do when you get to Victoria?" Emmy asked.
Septimus had not thought of it. "Go back to Nunsmere, I suppose, by the
next train--unless you want me?"
"No, I don't want you," said Emmy absently. "Why should I?"
And she gazed stonily at the suburban murk of the great city until they
reached Victoria. There, a dejected four-wheeled cab with a drooping horse
stood solitary on the rank--a depressing object. Emmy shivered at the
sight.
"I can't stand it. Drive me to my door. I know I'm a beast, Septimus dear,
but I am grateful. I am, really."
The cab received them into its musty interior and drove them through the
foggy brown of a London winter dawn. Unimaginable cheerlessness enveloped
them. The world wore an air of disgust at having to get up on such a
morning. The atmosphere for thirty yards around them was clear enough, with
the clearness of yellow consommé, but ahead it stood thick, like a purée of
bad vegetables. They passed through Belgravia, and the white-blinded houses
gave an impression of universal death, and the empty streets seemed waiting
for the doors to open and the mourners to issue forth. The cab, too, had
something of the sinister, in that it was haunted by the ghosts of a
fourpenny cigar and a sixpenny bottle of scent which continued a lugubrious
flirtation; and the windows rattled a _danse macabre_. At last it pulled up
at the door of Emmy's Mansions in Chelsea.
She looked at him very piteously, like a frightened child. Her pretty mouth
was never strong, but when the corners drooped it was babyish. She slipped
her hand in his.
"Don't leave me just yet. It's silly, I know--but this awful journey has
taken everything out of me. Every bit of it has been worse than the last.
Edith--that's my maid--will light a fire--you must get warm before you
start--and she'll make some coffee. Oh, do come. You can keep the cab."
"But what will your maid think?" asked Septimus, who for all his vagueness
had definite traditions as to the proprieties of life.
"What does it matter? What does anything in this ghastly world matter? I'm
frightened, Septimus, horribly frightened. I daren't go up by myself. Oh!
Come!"
Her voice broke on the last word. Saint Anthony would have yielded; also
his pig. Septimus handed her out of the cab, and telling the cabman to
wait, followed her through the already opened front door of the Mansions up
to her flat. She let herself in with her latchkey and showed him into the
drawing-room, turning on the electric light as he entered.
"I'll go and wake Edith," she said. "Then we can have some breakfast. The
fire's laid. Do you mind putting a match to it?"
She disappeared and Septimus knelt down before the grate and lit the paper.
In a second or two the flame caught the wood, and, the blower being down,
it blazed fiercely. He spread his ice-cold hands out before it, incurious
of the futile little room whose draperies and fripperies and inconsiderable
flimsiness of furniture proclaimed its owner, intent only on the elemental
need of warmth. He was disturbed by the tornadic entrance of Emmy.
"She's not here!" she exclaimed tragically. Her baby face was white and
there were dark shadows under the eyes which stared at him with a touch of
madness. "She's not here!"
"Perhaps she has gone out for a walk," Septimus suggested, as if London
serving-maids were in the habit of taking the air at eight o'clock on a
foggy morning.
But Emmy heard him not. The dismaying sense of utter loneliness smote her
down. It was the last straw. Edith, on whom she had staked all her hopes of
physical comfort, was not there. Overstrained in body, nerves, and mind,
she sank helplessly in the chair which Septimus set out for her before the
fire, too exhausted to cry. She began to speak in a queer, toneless voice:
"I don't know what to do. Edith could have helped me. I want to get away
and hide. I can't stay here. It's the first place Zora will come to. She
mustn't find me. Edith has been through it herself. She would have taken me
somewhere abroad or in the country where I could have stayed in hiding till
it was over. It was all so sudden--the news of his marriage. I was half
crazy, I couldn't make plans. I thought Edith would help me. Now she has
gone, goodness knows where. My God, what shall I do?"
She went on, looking at him haggardly, a creature driven beyond the
reticence of sex, telling her inmost secret to a man as if it were a
commonplace of trouble. It did not occur to her distraught mind that he was
a man. She spoke to herself, without thought, uttering the cry for help
that had been pent within her all that awful night.
The puzzledom of Septimus grew unbearable in its intensity; then suddenly
it burst like a skyrocket and a blinding rain of fire enveloped him. He
stood paralyzed with pain and horror.
The sullen morning light diffused itself through the room, mingling
ironically with the pretty glow cast by the pink-shaded electric globes,
while the two forlorn grotesques regarded each other, unconscious of each
other's grotesqueness, the girl disheveled and haggard, the man with rough
gray coat unbuttoned, showing the rumpled evening dress; her toque
miserably awry, his black tie riding above his collar, the bow somewhere
behind his ear. And the tragedy of tragedies of a young girl's life was
unfolded.
"My God, what am I to do?"
Septimus stared at her, his hands in his trousers pockets. In one of them
his fingers grasped a folded bit of paper. He drew it out unthinkingly--a
very dirty bit of paper. In his absent-minded way he threw it towards the
fire, but it fell on the tiled hearth. In moments of great strain the mind
seizes with pitiful eagerness on the trivial. Emmy looked at the paper.
Something familiar about its shape struck her. She leaned forward, picked
it up and unfolded it.
"This is a check," she said in a matter-of-fact tone. "Did you mean to
throw it away?"
He took it from her and, looking at it, realized that It was Clem Sypher's
check for two hundred pounds.
"Thanks," said he, thrusting it into his overcoat pocket.
Then his queerly working brain focused associations.
"I know what we can do," said he. "We can go to Naples."
"What good would that be?" she asked, treating the preposterous question
seriously.
He was taken aback by her directness, and passed his fingers through his
hair.
"I don't know," said he.
"The first thing we must do," said Emmy--and her voice sounded in her own
ears like someone else's--"is to get away from here. Zora will be down by
the first train after my absence is discovered. You quite see that Zora
mustn't find me, don't you?"
"Of course," said Septimus, blankly. Then he brightened. "You can go to an
hotel. A Temperance Hotel in Bloomsbury. Wiggleswick was telling me about
one the other day. A friend of his burgled it and got six years. A man
called Barkus."
"But what was the name of the hotel?"
"Ah! that I forget," said Septimus. "It had something to do with Sir Walter
Scott. Let me see. Lockhart--no, Lockhart's is a different place. It was
either the Bride of Lammermoor or--yes," he cried triumphantly, "it was the
Ravenswood, in Southampton Row."
Emmy rose. The switch off onto the trivial piece of paper had braced her
unstrung nerves for a final effort: that, and the terror of meeting Zora.
"You'll take me there. I'll just put some things together."
He opened the door for her to pass out. On the threshold she turned.
"I believe God sent you to Nunsmere Common last night."
She left him, and he went back to the fire and filled and lit his pipe. Her
words touched him. They also struck a chord of memory. His ever-wandering
mind went back to a scene in undergraduate days. It was the Corn Exchange
at Cambridge, where the most famous of all American evangelists was holding
one of a series of revivalist meetings. The great bare hall was packed with
youths, who came, some to scoff and others to pray. The coarse-figured,
bald-headed, brown-bearded man in black on the platform, with his homely
phrase and (to polite undergraduate ears) terrible Yankee twang, was
talking vehemently of the trivial instruments the Almighty used to effect
His purposes. Moses's rod, for instance. "You can imagine Pharaoh," said
he--and the echo of the great voice came to Septimus through the
years--"you can imagine Pharaoh walking down the street one day and seeing
Moses with a great big stick in his hand. 'Hallo, Moses,' says he, 'where
are you going?' 'Where am I going?' says Moses. 'I guess I'm going to
deliver the Children of Israel out of the House of Bondage and conduct them
to a land flowing with milk and honey.' 'And how are you going to do it,
Moses?' '_With this rod, sir, with this rod!_'"
Septimus remembered how this bit of unauthenticated history was greeted
with derision by the general, and with a shocked sense of propriety by the
cultivated--and young men at the university can be very cultivated indeed
on occasion. But the truth the great preacher intended to convey had
lingered at the back of his own mind and now came out into the light.
Perhaps Emmy had spoken more truly than she thought. In his simple heart he
realized himself to be the least effectual of men, apparently as unhelpful
towards a great deliverance as the walking stick used by Moses. But if God
had sent him to Nunsmere Common and destined him to be the mean instrument
of Emmy's deliverance? He rubbed the warm pipe bowl against his cheek and
excogitated the matter in deep humility. Yes, perhaps God had sent him. His
religious belief was nebulous, but up to its degree of clarity it was
sincere.
A few minutes later they were again in the cab jogging wearily across
London to Southampton Row; and the little empty drawing-room with all its
vanities looked somewhat ghostly, lit as it was by the day and by the
frivolously shaded electric light which they had forgotten to switch off.