XXV

Next morning Kate was duly repentant and begged Dick to forgive her for all

she had said and done. She told him that she loved him better than anything

in the world, and she persuaded him that if she had taken a drop too much,

it was owing to jealousy, and not to any liking for the drink itself.

Dick adopted the theory willingly (every man is reluctant to believe that

his wife is a drunkard), and deceived by the credulity with which he had

accepted the excuse, Kate resolved to conquer her jealousy, and if she

could not conquer it, she would endure it. Never would she seek escape from

it through spirit again. And had she remained in Manchester, or had she

even been placed in surroundings that would have rendered the existence of

a fixed set of principles possible, she might have cured herself of her

vice. But before two months her engagement at the Prince's came to an end,

and Dick's at the Royal very soon followed. They then passed into other

companies, the first of which dealt with Shakespearean revivals. Dick

played Don John successfully in _Much Ado About Nothing_, the Ghost in

_Hamlet_, the Friar in _Romeo and Juliet_. Kate on her side

represented with a fair amount of success a series of second parts, such as

Rosalind in _Romeo_, Bianca in _Othello_, Sweet Ann Page in the

_Merry Wives_. It is true there were times when her behaviour was not

all that could be desired, sometimes from jealousy, sometimes from drink;

generally from a mixture of the two; but on the whole she managed very

cleverly, and it was not more than whispered, and always with a

good-natured giggle, that Mrs. Lennox was not averse to a glass.

From the Shakespearean they went to join a dramatic company, where houses

were blown up, and ships sank amid thunder and lightning. Dick played a

desperate villain, and Kate a virtuous parlourmaid, until one night, having

surprised him in the act of kissing the manager's wife, she ran off to the

nearest pub, and did not return until she was horribly intoxicated, and

staggered on to the stage calling him the vilest names, accusing him at the

same time of adultery, and pointing out the manager's wife as his paramour.

There were shrieks and hysterics, and Dick had great difficulty in proving

his innocence to the angry impresario. He spoke of his honour and a duel,

but as the lady in question was starring, the benefit of the doubt had to

be granted her, and on these grounds the matter was hushed up. But after so

disgraceful a scandal it was impossible for the Lennoxes to remain in the

company. Dick was very much cut up about it, and without even claiming his

week's salary, he and his wife packed up their baskets and boxes and

returned to Manchester. And there he entered into a quantity of

speculations, of the character of which she had not the least idea; all she

knew was, that she never saw him from one end of the day to the other. He

was out of the place at ten o'clock in the morning, and never returned

before twelve at night. These hours of idleness and solitude were hard to

bear, and Kate begged of Dick to get her an engagement. But he was afraid

of another shameful scene, and always gave her the same answer--that he had

as yet heard of nothing, but as soon as he did he would let her know. She

didn't believe him, but she had to submit, for she could never muster up

courage to go and look for anything herself, and the long summer days

passed wearily in reading the accounts of the new companies, and the new

pieces produced. This sedentary life, and the effects of the brandy, which

she could now no longer do without, soon began to tell upon her health, and

the rich olive complexion began to fade to sickly yellow. Even Dick noticed

that she was not looking well; he said she required change of air, and a

few days after, he burst into the room and told her gaily that he had just

arranged a tour to go round the coast of England and play little comic

sketches and operettas at the pier theatres. This was good news, and the

next few days were fully occupied in trying over music, making up their

wardrobes, and telegraphing to London for the different books from which

they would make their selections. A young man whom Dick had heard singing

in a public-house proved a great hit. He wrote his own words, some of which

were considered so funny that at Scarborough and Brighton he frequently

received a couple of guineas for singing a few songs at private houses

after the public entertainment. Afterwards he appeared at the Pavilion, and

for many years supplied the axioms and aphorisms that young Toothpick and

Crutch was in the habit of using to garnish the baldness of his native

speech.

For a time the sea proved very beneficial to Kate's health, but the

never-ending surprises and expectations she was exposed to finished by so

straining and sharpening her nerves that the stupors, the assuagements of

drink, became, as it were, a necessary make-weight. Her love for Dick

pressed upon and agonized her; it was like a dagger whose steel was being

slowly reddened in the flames of brandy, and in this subtilization of the

brain the remotest particles of pain detached themselves, until life seemed

to her nothing but a burning and unbearable frenzy. She did not know what

she wanted of him, but with a longing that was nearly madness she desired

to possess him wholly; she yearned to bury her poor aching body, throbbing

with the anguish of nerves, in that peaceful hulk of fat, so calm, so

invulnerable to pain, marching amid, and contented in, its sensualities, as

a gainly bull grazing amid the pastures of a succulent meadow.

He was never unkind to her; the soft sleek manner that had won her remained

ever the same, but she would have preferred a blow. It would have been

something to have felt the strength of his hand upon her. She wanted an

emotion; she longed to be brutalized. She knew when she tortured him with

reproaches she was alienating from herself any affection he might still

bear for her; but she found it impossible to restrain herself. There seemed

to be a devil within her that goaded her until all power of will ceased,

and against her will she had to obey its behests. A blow might exorcise

this spirit. Were he to strike her to the ground she thought she might

still be saved; but, alas! he remained as kind and good-natured as ever;

and to disguise her drunkenness she had to exaggerate her jealousy. The two

were now mingled so thoroughly in her head that she could scarcely

distinguish one from the other. She knew there were women all around him;

she could see them ogling him out of the little boxes at the side of the

stage. How they could be such beasts, she couldn't conceive. They stood for

hours behind the scenes waiting for him, and she was told they had come for

engagements. Baskets of food, pork pies and tongue, came for him, but these

she pitched out of the window; and she soundly boxed the ears of one little

wretch, whom she had found loitering about the stage-door. Kate was right

sometimes in her suspicions, sometimes wrong, but in every case they

accentuated the neurosis, occasioned by alcohol, from which she was

suffering. Still, by some extraordinary cunning, she contrived for some

time to regulate her drinking so that it should not interfere with

business, and on the rare occasions when Dick had to apologize to the

public for her non-appearance she insisted that it was not her fault; and

from a mixture of vanity and a wish to conceal his wife's shame from

himself, Dick continued to persuade himself that his wife had no real taste

for drink, and never touched it except when these infernal fits of jealousy

were upon her. But the words that had come into his mind--'except when

these infernal fits of jealousy are upon her'--called up many vivid

memories; one especially confounded him. He had seen her frightened to

cross the dressing-room lest she might fall, glancing from the table to the

chair, calculating the distance. It was on his lips to ask her if she did

not feel too ill to appear that day: that perhaps it would be better for

him to go before the curtain and apologize to the public. But he had not

dared to say anything, and to his astonishment she was able to overcome the

influence of the drink (if she had taken any), and he had never heard her

sing and dance better. How she had managed it he did not know. 'All the

same,' he said, 'drink will get the upper hand of her and conquer her if she

doesn't make up her mind to conquer it. The day will come when she will not

be able to go on the stage, or will go on and fall down.' Dick shut his

eyes to exclude from them the horrible spectacle. She would then be an

unmitigated burden on his hands. 'Not a pleasant prospect', he said to

himself.

He had now been in the provinces for some years and had lived down the

memory of many disastrous managements. He had managed the tour of the

Morton and Cox's Opera Company very successfully till the crash came. 'But

it will be the success that will be remembered and not the crash when I

return to London. Many changes must have happened in town. Many new faces

and many old faces that absence will make new again. If only Kate were not

so jealous. If I could cure her of jealousy I could cure her of drink.' And

he thought of all the notices she had had for Clairette, for Serpolette,

for Olivette. He would like to see her play the Duchess. At that moment his

thoughts returned to the last time he had seen her, about half an hour ago;

the memory was not a pleasant one, and he was glad that he had run out of

the house and come down to the pier. And in the silence and solitude of the

pier at midday he asked himself again why he should not return to town and

take his chance of getting into a new company or being sent out to manage

another provincial tour. In London he might be able to persuade his wife to

go into a home, and he fell to thinking of the men and women who he had

heard had been cured of drunkenness. His thoughts melted into dreams and

then, passing suddenly out of dreams into words, he said: 'She will never

consent to go into a home, and if she did she would only be thinking all

the time that I'd put her there so that I might be after another woman.'

His thoughts were interrupted by a lancinating pain in his feet, and he

withdrew into the shade, and resting the heel of the right boot on the toe

of the left, a position that freed him from pain for the time being, he

looked round and seeing everywhere a misted sky filled with an inner

radiance, he said: 'To-day will be the hottest day we've had yet, and there

won't be a dozen people in the theatre; everybody will be too hot to leave

their houses.' There was languor in the incoming wave. 'We shan't have five

pounds in the theatre,' he muttered to himself, and catching sight of one

of the directors he continued, 'And those fellows won't think of the heat,

but will put down the falling off in the audience to our performance.

Never,' he added after a pause, 'have I seen the pier so empty,' and he

wondered who the woman was coming towards him.

A tall, gaunt woman of about forty-five whose striding gait caused a hooped

and pleated skirt of green silk, surmounted by a bustle, to sway like a

lime-tree in a breeze, wore a bodice open in front, with short sleeves, the

fag end of some other fashion, but the long draggled-tailed feather boa

belonged to the eighties, as did the Marie Stuart bonnet. Her blackened

eyebrows and a thickly painted face attracted Dick's attention from afar,

and when she approached nearer he was struck by the dark, brilliant,

restless eyes. 'A strange and exalted being,' he said to himself. 'An

authoress perhaps,' for he noticed that she carried some papers in her

hand; 'or a poet,' he added; and prompted by his instinct he began to see

in her somebody that might be turned to account, and before long he was

thinking how he might introduce himself to her.

'She's forgotten her parasol; I might borrow one for her from the girl at

the bar,' and the project seeming good to him he rose, and with a specially

large movement of the arm lifted his hat from his head.

'You will excuse me, I hope, madam, addressing you, and if I do so it is

because I am in an official capacity here, but may I offer you a parasol?'

'It's very kind of you,' she replied with a smile that lighted up her large

mouth, dispersing its ugliness.

'She's got a fine set of teeth,' Dick said to himself, and he answered that

he would borrow a parasol for her in the theatre.

'It's very kind of you,' she returned, smiling largely and becomingly upon

him. 'It's true I forgot to bring a parasol with me, and the sun is very

fierce at this time. It will be kind of you,' and much gratified that his

proposal had been so graciously received, he hobbled away in the direction

of the theatre, to return a few moments after with the bar girl's parasol,

which he had borrowed and which he opened and handed to the lady.

'Might I ask,' she said, 'if you're one of the directors of the theatre?'

'No,' he answered, 'I'm an actor.'

'An actor in this theatre,' she replied. 'But they only sing trivial songs

and dance in this theatre, and you look to me like one of Shakespeare's

imaginations. Henry the Eighth, almost any one of the Henries. King John.'

'Not Romeo,' Dick interposed.

'Perhaps not Romeo. Romeo was but sixteen or seventeen, eighteen at the

most. But when you were eighteen....'

'Yes,' Dick answered, 'I was thin enough then.'

'But you must not disparage yourself. Heroes are not always thin. Hamlet

was fat and scant of breath. I can see you as Hamlet, whereas to cast you

for Falstaff would be too obvious.'

'I've played Falstaff,' Dick replied, 'but I never could do much with the

part, and I never saw anyone who could. The lines are very often too

high-falutin for the character, and they don't seem to come out, no matter

who plays it; the critics look on it as the best acting part, but in truth

it is the worst.'

'Macduff would fit you, no; Lear,' the lady cried.

Dick thought he would like to have a shot at the king, and they were soon

talking about a Shakespearean theatre devoted to the performance of

Shakespearean plays. 'A theatre,' she said, 'that would devote itself to

the representation of all the heroes in the world; those who spoke noble

thoughts and performed noble deeds, thought and deed encompassing each

other, instead of which we have a thousand theatres devoted to the

representations of the fashions of the moment. So I'm forced to come here

at midday, for at midday there is solitude and sacred silence, or else the

clashing of waves. Here at midday I can fancy myself alone with my heroes.'

'And who are your heroes, may I ask?' said Dick.

'Many are in Shakespeare,' she answered, 'and many are here in this

manuscript. The heroes of the ancient world, when men were nearer to the

gods than they are now. For men,' she added, 'in my belief, are not moving

towards the Godhead, but away from it.'

'And who are the heroes that you've written about?' Dick asked, and fearing

she would enter into too long an explanation he asked if the manuscript she

held in her hand was a play.

'No, a poem,' she answered. 'I'm studying it for recitation, one I'm going

to recite after my lecture at the Working Men's Club; and the subject of my

lecture is the inherent nobility of man, and the necessity of man worship.

Women have turned from men and are occupied now with their own aspirations,

losing sight thereby of the ideal that God gave them. My poem is a sort of

abstract, an epitome, a compendium of the lecture itself.'

Dick did not understand, but the fact that a lady was going in for

recitation argued that she was interested in theatricals, and with his ears

pricked like a hound who has got wind of something, he said with a sweet

smile that showed a whole row of white teeth:

'Being an actor myself, I will take the liberty of asking you to allow me

to look at your poem, and perhaps if you're studying for recitation I may

be of use to you.'

'Of the very greatest use,' the lady answered, and handed him her

manuscript; 'one of a set of classical cartoons,' she added.

'Humanity in large lines,' he replied.

'How quickly you understand,' she rapped out; 'removed altogether from the

tea-table in subject and in metre. What have you got to say, my hero, to me

about my rendering of these lines?

'"The offspring of Neptune and Terra, daughters of earth

and ocean,

Dowered with fair faces of woman, capping the bodies

of vultures;

Armed with sharp, keen talons; crushing and rending

and slaying,

Blackening and blasting, defiling, spoiling the meats

of all banquets;

Plundering, perplexing, pursuing, cursing the lives of

our heroes,

Ever the Harpyiae flourish--just as a triumph of evil."'

'Hardly anything; and yet if I may venture a criticism--would you mind

passing your manuscript on to me for a moment? May I suggest an emendation

that will render the recitation more easy and more effective?'

'Certainly you may.'

'Then,' Dick continued, 'I would drop the words--"just as a triumph of

evil," and run on--"flourish from childhood, ensnaring the noble, the

brave, and the loyal, spreading their nets for destruction,"

'"Harpyiae flourish in ball-rooms, breathing fierce breath

that is poison

Over the promise of manhood, over the faith and the

lovelight

That glows in the hearts of our bravest for all of their

kind that is weaker----"

'All that follows,' Dick added, 'will be recited without emphasis until you

come to these two magnificent lines:

'"Harpyiae stand by our altars, Harpyiae sit by our

hearthstones,

Harpyiae suckle our children, Harpyiae ravish our

nation," etc.'

Dick finished with a grand gesture.

'I think you're right. Yes, I understand that a point can be given to these

verses that I had not thought of before. I hope my poem touched a chord in

your heart? Do you approve of my manner of writing the hexameters?'

'I think the idea very fine, but----'

'But?'

'If you will permit me?'

'Certainly.'

'Well, there are questions of elocution that I would like to speak to you

about. I've to run away now, but we're sure to meet again.'

'I'm on the pier every day at noon, or you will find me in my hotel at

five. I hope you'll come, for I should like to avail myself of your

instruction.'

'Thank you; I hope to have the pleasure of calling upon you to-morrow

afternoon. Good-bye.'

'You don't know my name,' she cried after him. 'Heroes are full of

forgetfulness and naturally, but in this tea-table world we can't get on

without names and addresses. Will you take my card?'

Dick took the card, thanked her and turned suddenly away.

'Like a man filled with disquiet,' the lady said, and she watched the burly

actor hurrying up the pier. 'Is this woman coming to meet him?' she asked

herself as Dick hurried away still faster, for in the distance the woman

coming down the pier seemed to him like his wife, and if Kate caught him

talking to a woman on the pier all chance of doing any business with his

new acquaintance would be at an end. But the woman who had just passed him

by was not Kate, and the thought crossed his mind that he might return to

his new acquaintance with safety. But on the whole it seemed to him better

to wait until to-morrow. To-morrow he would find out all about her. 'Her

name,' he said, and taking the card out of his pocket he read: 'Mrs.

Forest, Mother Superior of the Yarmouth Convent, Alexandra Hotel,

Hastings.' 'Mother Superior of a Convent! I should never have thought it.

But if she is a nun, why isn't she in a habit? Classical cartoons and

nunneries. I think this time I've hit upon a strange specimen, one of the

strangest I've ever met, which is saying a great deal, for I've met with a

good few in my time. It will be better to tear up her card, for if Kate

should find it----'

And then, dismissing Mrs. Forest from his mind, he wondered if he should

find Kate drunk or sober. 'Quite sober,' he said to himself as soon as he

crossed the threshold; and in the best of humours his wife greeted him, and

taking his arm they went down to the pier and gave an entertainment that

was appreciated by a fairly large audience.

'Why didn't she ask me to come to her at five to-day?' he asked himself as

he returned home with his wife. 'She may fall through my fingers,' and he

would have gone straight away to Mrs. Forest, if he had been able to rid

himself of Kate.

'You'll take me out to tea, Dick?' she said, and to keep her sober he took

her to tea. For the nonce Kate drunk would have suited him better than Kate

sober, and he dared not go down to the pier next morning in search of Mrs.

Forest, it being more than likely that Kate might take it into her head to

sun herself on the pier, so he decided to wait; the pier was too dangerous.

If he weren't interrupted by Kate the directors might see them together,

and they might know Mrs. Forest and tell her that he was a married man. No,

he'd just keep his appointment with her at five. But to get rid of Kate

required a deep plan. It was laid and succeeded, and at five he arrived at

the Alexandra Hotel.

'Is Mrs. Forest in?'

The hall porter told the page boy to take Mr. Lennox up to Mrs. Forest's

rooms.

'All this smells money,' Dick said to himself in the lift.

The page boy threw open the door, and after walking through a long corridor

the boy knocked at a door, and Dick walked into a red twilight in which he

caught sight of a green dress in a distant corner.

'I hope you're not one of those people who require the glare of the sun

always. I like the sun in its proper place out of doors,' and while

thinking of an appropriate answer Dick strove to find his way through the

numerous pieces of furniture littered over the carpet.

'Come and sit on the sofa beside me.'

'If you'll allow me,' he answered, 'I will sit in this armchair. I shall be

able to devote myself more completely to the hearing of your poem.'

It was not polite to refuse to sit beside the lady, but Dick contrived to

convey that her presence would trouble his intellectual enjoyment, and the

slight displeasure which the refusal had caused vanished out of the painted

face. This first success almost succeeded in screwing up Dick's courage to

the point of asking her if he might remove the flower vase that stood on

the cabinet behind him, but he did not dare, and at every moment he seemed

to recognize a new scent. An odour of burning pastilles drifted from a

distant corner into a zone of patchouli in which the lady seemed to have

encircled herself and which her every movement seemed to spread in more and

more violent flavours, till Dick began to think he would not be able to

hold out till the end of the lady's narrative. Patchouli always gave him a

headache, but the word 'opera' restored him to himself, and with lips

quivering like a cat watching a sparrow he heard that the subject of her

opera was derived from her own life; and telling him that it could not be

understood without a relation of the events that had given it birth, she

drew her legs up on the sofa, and leaning her head against the back

commenced in a low, cooing, but not disagreeable voice to tell of her first

love adventure. 'I might almost call my departure for Bulgaria, some ten

years ago, a spiritual adventure,' she said.

The departure for Bulgaria seemed full of interest, but from Dick's point

of view the leading up to the departure was unduly prolonged, and he found

it difficult to listen with any show of interest to Mrs. Forest's

assurances that until she met the Bulgarian she had thought that babies

were found in parsley-beds or under gooseberry-bushes, and this innocence

of mind was so inherent in her that the Bulgarian had not succeeded

altogether in robbing her of it. 'Nor, indeed, did he ever attempt to do

so,' she continued. 'Our friendship was founded purely on the intellect.'

This admission was a disappointment to Dick, who had looked forward to the

story of a novel love adventure which might easily be worked into a comic

opera, Bulgaria offering a suitable background. With many pretty smiles he

tried to lead the lady into the real story of her past, but Mrs. Forest

insisted so well that he was fain to believe that there had been no past in

her life suitable to comic opera. Her Bulgarian adventure had been animated

by love of liberty and a noble desire to free an oppressed race from the

ignoble rule of the Turks; 'massacres,' she said, 'full of nameless

horrors.'

Dick would have liked her to name these horrors, but before he could ask

her to do so she was telling him of the instinct in every woman to mother

something. The Bulgarians had appealed to her sympathies, and she had

helped to bring about their liberation by her poetry. In three years she

had learnt the language and had composed two volumes of poems in it.

'I've looked out copies of my Bulgarian poems for you,' and she leaned over

the edge of the sofa towards a small table. The movement disarranged her

skirt, and Dick's eyes were regaled by the show of a thick shapeless leg,

'doubtless swarthy,' he said to himself.

'The title of the first volume,' she said, handing him the books, 'is,

_Songs of a Stranger_. My friend the Bulgarian' (and she mentioned an

unpronounceable name) 'contributed a preface. The second volume is

entitled, _New Songs by the Stranger_. You will find a translation

appended to each.'

Dick promised that he would read the poems as soon as he got home, and

begged Mrs. Forest to proceed with her interesting story of the war in

which she had lost her great friend, her spiritual adventure, as she called

him.

From Bulgaria she had set forth on a long journey, visiting many parts of

China, returning home full of love for Eastern civilization, and regret

that Western influence would soon make an end of it. 'But,' she said, 'when

I think of my own life, my narrative seems but a faint echo of it all; only

a fragment of it appears, whereas, if I could tell the whole of it----'

But Dick inclined to the belief that her genius was dramatic rather than

narrative, and to bring the autobiography to an end, he asked her how she

had come to be the Mother Superior of the Yarmouth Convent. 'If I can only

get her to cut the cackle and get to the 'osses,' he said to himself, but

this was not easy to do. Mrs. Forest had to relate her socialistic

adventures, her engagement to Edgar Horsley.

'For three years,' she said, 'I was engaged to him, and at the end of this

time it seemed to me that we must come to an understanding. He was talking

of going to Jamaica, and to go to Jamaica with him we would have to be

married. So I went down to where he was staying in the country, a cottage

in Somersetshire, at the end of a very pretty lane.'

'Good God! if she's going to describe the landscape to me,' said Dick to

himself. But Mrs. Forest had no eye for the appearance of trees showing

against the sky, and she was quickly at the cottage door, which was opened

to her, she said, by a suspicious-looking woman, who said, 'I think I've

heard of you. Mr. Horsley is out, but you can come in and wait,' 'and in

about half an hour he came in and introduced me to the woman who had opened

the door to me. "Isabel" is all that I can remember of her name. "Isabel,"

he said, "has been living with me for the last ten years, but if you like

to come with us to Jamaica you can join us." This seemed to me to be an

inacceptable proposition. "What you propose to me," I said, "is

unthinkable," and I left the house, and have not seen or heard of Mr. Edgar

Horsley since. I've looked at water, I've looked at poison, and I've looked

at daggers.'

Dick asked her why she had meditated suicide and she answered:

'Was not such an end to a three years' engagement sufficient to inspire in

any woman a thought of suicide? And I'm very exceptional.'

A great deal of Mrs. Forest's life had been unfolded; the only thing that

remained in obscurity was how she had come to be the Mother Superior of the

Yarmouth Convent, and to make that plain, she said it would be necessary to

tell the story of her conversion to the Catholic faith. 'But that was after

the convent; the convent was intended for the reformation of dipsomaniacs,

female drunkards,' she said; 'but it was afterwards that I became a Roman

Catholic.'

Dick had no wish to hear what dogma it was that had tempted her, but it

amused him as he returned home to think of all the strange things that Mrs.

Forest had told him; one thing especially amused him, that her real

interest in Catholicism was the confessional. 'How one does get back to

oneself in all these things,' he muttered as he panted up the hot steep

road. 'A convent for the reformation of female drunkards,' he repeated.

'It's very strange: she can't know anything about my wife. A strange

woman,' he continued, and fell to thinking if all that she had told him was

the truth, or if it was one of those stories that people imagine about

themselves, and imagine so vividly that after a few years they begin to

believe that everything they have told has befallen them. He pulled the

books from his pocket; they were evidently written in a strange language,

but there were people who could learn languages and could do nothing else.

Her Bulgarian poetry could not be better than her English, and he knew what

that was like. 'I suppose as soon as she hears I'm married, and she's sure

to find out sooner or later, she will be off on some other back. But is

this altogether sure?' He had not walked many steps before he remembered

that the lecture she was giving at the Working Men's Club was on the

chastity of the marriage state; moreover, she had admitted to him that the

Bulgarian adventure was a spiritual one. 'I should say she was a woman with

a big temperament which must have been worth gratifying when she went away

with that Bulgarian; I wouldn't have minded being in his skin. She hasn't

forgotten that she was once a beautiful girl, that's the worst of it, she

hasn't forgotten,' and Dick remembered that at parting she was a little

demonstrative, saying to him on the staircase: 'But we aren't parting for

long. You will be here tomorrow at my door at the same hour.'