“Interviewing?” he suggested. The City of her Dreams! The mingled voices of the crowd shaped itself into a mocking laugh.!

“You didn’t know him, dear,” she had said to Joan. “All his faults were on the outside.” She paused with the door in her hand, and a faint smile played round the thin red lips.

It was on her tongue to ask him, as so often she had meant to do of late, what had been the cause of her mother’s illness—if illness it was: what it was that had happened to change both their lives. But always something had stopped her—something ever present, ever watchful, that seemed to shape itself out of the air, bending towards her with its finger on its lips. What was she to do? Drag the woman back to life against her will—lead her back to him to be a chain about his feet until the end? Then leave him to fight the battle alone? Again the question troubled her. She had not seen her father since that week-end, nearly six months ago, when she had ran down to see him because she wanted something from him. “He felt my mother’s death very deeply,” she answered. “But he’s well enough in health.”