The next morning she went into town with them. She never seemed to have any time in London, and wanted to do some shopping. They joined her again for lunch and afterwards, at her father’s suggestion, she and Arthur went for a walk. They took the tram out of the city and struck into the country. The leaves still lingered brown and red upon the trees. He carried her cloak and opened gates for her and held back brambles while she passed. She had always been indifferent to these small gallantries; but to-day she welcomed them. She wished to feel her power to attract and command. They avoided all subjects on which they could differ, even in words. They talked of people and places they had known together. They remembered their common love of animals and told of the comedies and tragedies that had befallen their pets. Joan’s regret was that she had not now even a dog, thinking it cruel to keep them in London. She hated the women she met, dragging the poor little depressed beasts about at the end of a string: savage with them, if they dared to stop for a moment to exchange a passing wag of the tail with some other little lonely sufferer. It was as bad as keeping a lark in a cage. She had tried a cat: but so often she did not get home till late and that was just the time when the cat wanted to be out; so that they seldom met. He suggested a parrot. His experience of them was that they had no regular hours and would willingly sit up all night, if encouraged, and talk all the time. Joan’s objection to running a parrot was that it stamped you as an old maid; and she wasn’t that, at least, not yet. She wondered if she could make an owl really happy. Minerva had an owl. She knew the place. A sad group of dilapidated little houses forming three sides of a paved quadrangle, with a shattered fountain and withered trees in the centre. Ever since she could remember, they had stood there empty, ghostly, with creaking doors and broken windows, their gardens overgrown with weeds.!

“You don’t think you could, dear,” she whispered, “if I didn’t do anything wicked any more. But just let things take their course.” He laughed. “And this new journal of his?” he asked. “It’s got to be published in London, hasn’t it?”

“Ah,” he said, “you would understand if you had. When one of the horses goes down gored, his entrails lying out upon the sand, you know what they do, don’t you? They put a rope round him, and drag him, groaning, into the shambles behind. And once there, kind people like you and Monsieur le Médecin tend him and wash him, and put his entrails back, and sew him up again. He thinks it so kind of them—the first time. But the second! He understands. He will be sent back into the arena to be ripped up again, and again after that. This is the third time I have been wounded, and as soon as you’ve all patched me up and I’ve got my breath again, they’ll send me back into it. Mam’selle will forgive my not feeling grateful to her.” He gave a short laugh that brought the blood into his mouth. The speaker sat a little way apart. The light from the oil lamp, suspended from the ceiling, fell upon his face. He wore a peasant’s blouse. It seemed to her a face she knew. Possibly she had passed him in the village street and had looked at him without remembering. It was his eyes that for long years afterwards still haunted her. She did not notice at the time what language he was speaking. But there were none who did not understand him. “How far are you going?” demanded Flossie.