“Well, you see, dear,” explained the little old lady, “he gave up things. He could have ridden in his carriage”—she was quoting, it seemed, the words of the Carlyles’ old servant—“if he’d written the sort of lies that people pay for being told, instead of throwing the truth at their head.” Joan took him into her room at the end of the ward, from where, through the open door, she could still keep watch. They spoke in low tones.!

“I like the houses, too,” he said. “There’s a character about them. You don’t often find such fine drawing-rooms in London.” “Tell me,” she said, “what interfered with it?” Unconsciously she was leaning forward, her chin supported by her hands. Their faces were very near to one another.

“No. Not since about a month,” she answered. “Why?” Arthur Allway was her cousin, the son of a Nonconformist Minister. Her father had taken him into the works and for the last three years he had been in Egypt, helping in the laying of a tramway line. He was in love with her: at least so they all told her; and his letters were certainly somewhat committal. Joan replied to them—when she did not forget to do so—in a studiously sisterly vein; and always reproved him for unnecessary extravagance whenever he sent her a present. The letter announced his arrival at Southampton. He would stop at Birmingham, where his parents lived, for a couple of days, and be in Liverpool on Sunday evening, so as to be able to get straight to business on Monday morning. Joan handed back the letter. It contained nothing else. “They afford much food for reflection,” thought Mr. Simson, “though I cannot myself go as far as you do in including Christianity under that heading.”