“Have you seen her?” she asked. “How is she?” Her father had completed his business, and both were glad to leave London. She had a sense of something sinister, foreboding, casting its shadow on the sordid, unclean streets, the neglected buildings falling into disrepair. A lurking savagery, a half-veiled enmity seemed to be stealing among the people. The town’s mad lust for pleasure: its fierce, unjoyous laughter: its desire ever to be in crowds as if afraid of itself: its orgies of eating and drinking: its animal-like indifference to the misery and death that lay but a little way beyond its own horizon! She dared not remember history. Perhaps it would pass.!

“I think she could,” answered Joan, “if she would pull herself together. It’s her lack of will-power that’s the trouble.” “I’se tooked them off,” explained Joan. A piece of information that really, all things considered, seemed unnecessary.

Joan was pouring out the tea. “Oh, nothing,” she answered, “but just be agreeable to the right people. He’ll tell you who they are. And take care of him.” “Oh, there were times,” answered Joan, “when she was more like her old self again. But I don’t think she ever quite got over it. Unless it was towards the end,” she added. “They told me she seemed much better for a little while before she died. I was away at Cambridge at the time.” She reached home in the evening. The Phillips’s old rooms had been twice let since Christmas, but were now again empty. The McKean with his silent ways and his everlasting pipe had gone to America to superintend the production of one of his plays. The house gave her the feeling of being haunted. She had her dinner brought up to her and prepared for a long evening’s work; but found herself unable to think—except on the one subject that she wanted to put off thinking about. To her relief the last post brought her a letter from Arthur. He had been called to Lisbon to look after a contract, and would be away for a fortnight. Her father was not as well as he had been.