It was some time before she fell asleep. The high glass faced her as she lay in bed. She could not get away from the idea that it was her mother’s face that every now and then she saw reflected there. “Yes,” answered the girl. “The voice of weakness.”!

Mr. McKean shook her hand vigorously without looking at her. Strength! The shaded lamplight fell upon his fearless kindly face with its flashing eyes and its humorous mouth. He ought to have been drinking out of a horn, not a wine glass that his well-shaped hand could have crushed by a careless pressure. In a winged helmet and a coat of mail he would have looked so much more fitly dressed than in that soft felt hat and ridiculous blue tie.

“Wasting my time and money hanging about newspaper offices, listening to silly talk from old fossils,” she told him. Those drawing-rooms? Might not something of the sort be possible? Not, perhaps, the sumptuous salon of her imagination, thronged with the fair and famous, suitably attired. Something, perhaps, more homely, more immediately attainable. Some of the women dressed, perhaps, a little dowdily; not all of them young and beautiful. The men wise, perhaps, rather than persistently witty; a few of them prosy, maybe a trifle ponderous; but solid and influential. Mrs. Denton’s great empty house in Gower Street? A central situation and near to the tube. Lords and ladies had once ruffled there; trod a measure on its spacious floors; filled its echoing stone hall with their greetings and their partings. The gaping sconces, where their link-boys had extinguished their torches, still capped its grim iron railings. “No,” the child answered. “Mama had a headache this morning, and I slipped out. You’re not keeping your promise.”