“It is what I should love,” she answered. “Tell me what to do.” She was not conscious of the low, vibrating tone in which she spoke. “No,” answered Joan. “I’m a Lancashire lass.”!

“I’m not good at getting on with people,” she explained. “But couldn’t you have done anything to stop it?” demanded a Frenchman, lying next to him. “All your millions of Socialists, what were they up to? What went wrong with the Internationale, the Universal Brotherhood of Labour, and all that Tra-la-la?”

“Only through the bars, in future,” she promised. “With the gaoler between us.” She put her arms round Flossie and bent her head, so that her face was hidden. And as she did so, it seemed to her that someone passing breathed upon her lips a little kiss: and for a while she did not move. Then, treading softly, she looked into the room. She had been fashioned to be his helpmate, as surely as if she had been made of the same bone. Nature was at one with God. Spirit and body both yearned for him. It was not position—power for herself that she craved. The marriage market—if that had been her desire: it had always been open to her. She had the gold that buys these things. Wealth, ambition: they had been offered to her—spread out temptingly before her eyes. They were always within her means, if ever she chose to purchase them. It was this man alone to whom she had ever felt drawn—this man of the people, with that suggestion about him of something primitive, untamed, causing her always in his presence that faint, compelling thrill of fear, who stirred her blood as none of the polished men of her own class had ever done. His kind, strong, ugly face: it moved beside her: its fearless, tender eyes now pleading, now commanding.