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. Joan crept out softly from the room.!

He asked her questions about herself. But she could see that he was tired; so she told him it was too important a matter to start upon so late. She would talk about herself to-morrow. It would be Sunday. “I’m afraid I’m an awful nuisance to you,” he said. “I get these moods at times. You’re not angry with me?”

“I have always loved him,” Joan answered. “It was he didn’t love me, for a time, as I thought. But I know now that he does.” “Oh, she’s changed a good deal,” answered Joan. “But I think she’ll get over it all right, if she’s careful.” In her white night dress, with her hair in two long plaits, she looked at herself once more. She seemed to be no one of any importance at all: just a long little girl going to bed. With no one to kiss her good night.