“Oh, the plainer you make it that you don’t want them, the more sport they think it,” interrupted the girl with a laugh. Young Allway arrived just as Joan and her father had sat down to supper. A place had been laid for him. He flushed with pleasure at seeing her; but was not surprised.!

“Beg pardon, nurse,” he said, “but we’ve sent for a stretcher, as the police don’t seem in any hurry. Would you like us to take him. Or would it upset him, do you think, if he knew?” “I thought you were something,” answered the girl. “I’m an artist. Or, rather, was,” she added after a pause.

“I am getting thin, ain’t I?” she said. “I always wanted to be thin.” They both laughed. A fierce anger blazed up in her brain. Why should she listen? Why had reason been given to us if we were not to use it—weigh good and evil in the balance and decide for ourselves where lay the nobler gain? Were we to be led hither and thither like blind children? What was right—what wrong, but what our own God-given judgment told us? Was it wrong of the woman to perform this act of self-renunciation, yielding up all things to love? No, it was great—heroic of her. It would be her cross of victory, her crown. “I started out to preach the gospel: all that sort of thing,” drawled a Miss Simmonds from beneath a hat that, if she had paid for it, would have cost her five guineas. “Now my chief purpose in life is to tickle silly women into spending twice as much upon their clothes as their husbands can afford, bamboozling them into buying any old thing that our Advertising Manager instructs me to boom.”