Jimmy strolled about until two o'clock—he was not of the kind which calls just before lunch-time—then went back to the club.

"Not in yet, sir," the waiter said. "But he may come about four o'clock for a cup of tea. He usually does, if he's in town."

Jimmy sighed. He was sick of waiting about; but he craved for the society of someone he knew, and the idea of going back to spend the rest of the day in those suburban lodgings seemed intolerable. So he decided to wait, and walked down the narrow side street into the Strand, and thence westwards, in more or less aimless fashion. He had never known town sufficiently well to note the changes which the last ten years had brought; possibly, they would not have interested him greatly in any case, for he was a Londoner by birth, and the true Londoner looks at the people and ignores the buildings.

He walked slowly, up to Piccadilly Circus, and thence along Regent Street to Oxford Circus, where he turned eastwards again.

"Are you saved?" A tall gaunt man, in shabby clerical costume and black woollen gloves, whispered the words in his ear, endeavoured to thrust a tract into his hand, then hurried on towards the Circus. Jimmy looked round quickly to see him repeat the process with an obviously astonished German, then forgot all about the crank and his ways, for, coming up behind him, clad just as she had been the night he saw her getting into the cab in the Strand, was the tall girl whose face had been haunting his memory.

Jimmy turned aside quickly and stared into a shop whilst she was passing, then started to follow her at a little distance, not with the least idea of making her acquaintance, but because some curious instinct seemed to compel him to do so. She was walking rather fast, holding her head erect, and looking neither to the right nor to the left; and, a moment later, Jimmy saw the reason, for, just behind her, obviously dogging her steps, was a great, overdressed African native, typical of those who are sent by scores to England, to have a so-called education wasted on them, sensual and lickerous savages, who may be quite admirable as carriers in the West Coast jungles, but are wholly abominable when allowed loose in the streets of London.

In common with every sane Englishman who has travelled, Jimmy had no illusions left on the colour question. To him, the bare idea of a coloured man speaking to a white woman was horrible, and here was the worst form of coloured man, the son of the cannibal and the devil-worshipper, trying to force himself on a white girl. Jimmy went hot suddenly, a woman who was passing gave a little gasp as she saw the look in his eyes; then he quickened his pace to catch up the two in front, coming behind them in time to see the native deliberately jostle the girl, then raise his glossy silk hat with a lascivious smile and begin an apology. With flaming cheeks, the girl turned quickly, coming face to face with Jimmy; but her persecutor's blood was up, and he followed, still hat in hand. In a moment, Jimmy saw red, and, almost before he knew what he was doing, he had caught the other on the point of the jaw with his fist. The black man staggered, but recovered himself, and for an instant it looked as though he were going to show fight; but his colour told, and he looked round for a line of retreat, just as a policeman, seeing the rapidly-gathering knot of spectators, came up to investigate.

Jimmy, white-faced and fierce-eyed, listened in contemptuous silence whilst the coloured man was giving his version, which was corroborated by a rather long-haired person with a small white tie, who professed to have seen the incident.

"This person"—he indicated Jimmy with a wave of a podgy hand—"this person struck the dark gentleman a most cruel blow, entirely unprovoked. I shall be most happy to give evidence," and he produced a card, a printed one, stating that he was the Rev. Silas Lark, whilst the address indicated that his business was the conversion of the heathen.

The constable gave him a keen look, and took the slip of pasteboard rather doubtfully. "I see," he said, then he turned to Jimmy. "What have you got to say to it all, sir?"

Jimmy told his story in a few words, then he glanced round to where the girl had been standing; but, with a mingled sense of disappointment and relief, he saw that she had slipped away. "I don't want to bring the lady's name into it, of course," he added, as he gave his own name and address.

"Now, then, move on there." The constable closed his notebook and dispersed the little crowd; then he turned to Jimmy again, "I don't expect you'll hear any more of this, sir. We've had one or two complaints about that black man and his friends, and as for the Reverend Mr. Silas," he smiled, grimly, "we've been told to watch him as a pickpocket." He glanced at Jimmy again. "You look as if you've come from abroad, sir, or else I shouldn't have told you so much. Take it from me, Oxford Street is just alive with wrong 'uns in the afternoon, women as well as men." Then he drew himself up, and went on to superintend the raising of a fallen cab-horse, which served also to draw off the few who were still staring at Jimmy. He was looking for the tall girl; and, a moment later, he was rewarded by seeing her coming out of a tea-shop with a paper-bag in her hand. She gave him a frank little smile of recognition, and, emboldened, he raised his hat and went up to her.

"Thank you so much," she said. "I—I hope there won't be trouble for you. I couldn't be in it, you see, so I slipped in there on the excuse of buying a bun."

"Oh, it'll be all right," Jimmy answered lightly. "I don't mind paying a fine for the pleasure of teaching a nigger manners," then, seeing she looked tired and upset, he asked suddenly, "Will you come and have some tea in here?" indicating a large restaurant they were passing.

The girl nodded. "Thank you. I should like some," she answered simply. Her voice was sweet and refined, and, seeing her closely, Jimmy found that she was even better-looking than he had imagined, whilst her carriage was perfection.

Nothing more was said until they were seated at one of the little tables in the palm court, then, suddenly, "Oh, how I loathe those black men." She brought the words out with a little shudder. "There are three or four of them haunt Oxford Street."

"Are you often about town?" Jimmy asked. She looked at him with a kind of grave surprise; then she turned away as she answered, "I am always about town. I have to be. You understand?" Her voice was very low, but the words were perfectly distinct.

Unconsciously, Jimmy twisted his gloves in his two hands so fiercely that one of them tore nearly in half. The daylight seemed to have gone suddenly, leaving the gilding of the place dull and heavy. He understood. Her words had killed all the romance of their meeting; yet, when he looked at her again, he could hardly believe she was speaking the truth.

The waiter brought the tea, and she poured it out, with far more grace of manner and movement than Mrs. Marlow would have shown. Moreover, she made no affectation about not wanting the dainty little sandwiches and cakes. "They are so delicious that I feel it's a sin to leave them," she said, when he declared he would have no more.

"What is your name?" he asked abruptly, breaking what had been rather a long silence. She was dusting some minute crumbs off her dress, and she answered without looking up, "Penrose, Lalage Penrose."

She did not ask for his name, but he volunteered it; then, "May I come and see you?" he added.

The girl hesitated a moment. "Why not?" she asked at last, but she flushed at her own words, and her hand was unsteady as she wrote down the address, which was one of a block of flats near Baker Street.

"Can I come to-morrow afternoon?"

She nodded and got up. At the entrance of the restaurant she stopped and held out her hand. "Good-bye, and thank you."

"It's only au revoir, isn't it?" he answered, as he raised his hat, then without looking back, for fear she would think he was watching her, he walked away rapidly, his feelings a mixture of elation and of something very nearly akin to misery.

Douglas Kelly was in when Jimmy called again at the club. "The waiter gave me your card and I supposed you would come along soon. You look a bit doleful. What are you going to drink?... That was a good article of yours in the Whitehall Gazette this evening."

Jimmy set his glass down suddenly. "I haven't seen it; in fact, I was expecting to find the manuscript waiting for me when I got back."

Kelly laughed. "So that's the reason of the dumps? The postman drops 'em through the letter-box with a kind of sickening thud, and you feel there's nothing left to live for, unless it's to kill the editor. I went through it all, until I made 'em understand they must have my signature at my own price. Still, you haven't done so badly in the few days you've been home. Dodgson tells me they've got another article of yours in type. Here, Romsey," he hailed a man who had just come in, whose face somehow seemed familiar to Jimmy, "I want to introduce you to an old colleague of mine, Grierson, who is going to knock spots out of you all."

The new-comer grinned. "I've seen him knocking spots out a nigger in Oxford Street already. It'll be in the next edition of the Evening Post, 'Outrageous assault on an African Prince.' I happened to be passing and got seven shillings-worth of copy out of it," he added, turning to Jimmy. "I left your name out, though. But, you see, the Evening Post believes in a man and a brother, and sacks its boys if it finds they have been vaccinated; so the story exactly suited them. The Prince, too, has just sold the gold-mining rights of his native swamp, and has held a reception in Exeter Hall, so he in himself was good stuff for us." Then he gave Kelly a moderately truthful account of what had occurred.

Kelly did not laugh. "It won't go down here, Jimmy, that sort of thing. Of course you were right; it's an abominable scandal to let these niggers loose; but at home people'll never understand it. If your name were to come out, you would be done, right away. And," he looked at him keenly, "your lady friends should know better than to be alone in that part of Oxford Street. Well, Romsey, are you going to pay for the drinks out of your seven shillings, or am I? Then I'm going to put Jimmy up for the club, and you can second him."



CHAPTER IX

That day Jimmy did not go back to his lodgings. Instead, he sent a wire to Mrs. Benn, and went to dine and spend the night with the Kellys, although he did not get away from the club until he had been introduced to a score of journalists to whom his host described him as an old colleague. As a result they were an hour late for dinner when they reached the flat.

"It doesn't matter; my wife won't mind," Kelly remarked cheerfully as they went up in the lift, and, a few moments later, when he met Mrs. Kelly Jimmy saw that her husband was speaking the truth.

Dora Kelly was a pretty, thrifty little woman, with a mass of rather untidy fair hair. She was still in the tea-gown which, apparently, she had been wearing all the day, whilst her foot-gear consisted of a pair of Japanese slippers; and yet the whole effect was charming, possibly because she was entirely unaffected and obviously happy. The flat reflected the character of its mistress. It was full of good things, all in wonderful disarray. Even the drawing-room had an air of having undergone a strenuous straightening up a month previously, since which event it had not been touched again.

"Dinner won't be long, Douglas," Mrs. Kelly said. "But the cook went out at four o'clock and hasn't come in yet; I'm afraid she must have got drunk again; so I borrowed the Harmers' servant," she turned to Jimmy. "Servants are such a nuisance, Mr. Grierson, yet one daren't discharge them, and our cook is a treasure when she's sober. Douglas says you live in lodgings in some suburb, so you don't have those worries, I suppose. Here it's dreadful." She shook her head dolefully; but a moment later she was smiling again and chattering gaily about her own experiences in lodgings. She had been on the Press herself prior to her marriage, and she knew, only too well, the ways of the London landlady.

If he had not chanced to saunter up Oxford Street that afternoon Jimmy would have enjoyed immensely his dinner and the long talk which followed it. He had been craving for the society of his own kind; yet now he had got it it did not seem such a very great thing after all; for Lalage Penrose had come into his life, and the thought of her was uppermost in his mind. Even whilst he was talking over old times with Kelly, or listening to Dora Kelly's laughing descriptions of the struggles of their early married life, he was wondering how Lalage was spending the evening, and the thought was making him sick at heart. Mentally, he cursed himself for a fool, and tried hard to put the memory away from him; but it was an effort all the time; and when Kelly finally allowed him to go to bed, long after midnight, he shut his door with a sigh of relief. But he did not undress. Instead, he sat in a big armchair, staring into the fire, which, having been lighted by the borrowed servant just before she left, a full three hours previously, had now died down to a red glow.

He was a fool, and he knew it. The stronger part of his nature, that which came of the alien streak in his father, warned him of the danger of thinking seriously of chance female acquaintances, told him that no man of the world ever did so; whilst to the Grierson strain in him anything in the way of an intrigue was an unpardonable offence against the canons of respectability. Douglas Kelly, the Bohemian, and Walter Grierson, the city man, would both have called him mad, agreeing on this point, if on none other; for they would argue that only a madman could feel that he had any regard for a strange girl, who, by her own showing, was without the pale. Suddenly he resolved to have no more to do with Lalage. He would destroy her address, avoid those parts of the town where he might possibly see her, drop the acquaintance before it went any further.

He got up suddenly, took the slip of paper Lalage had given him out of his pocket, and stood staring at words on it. It was well-written, in the hand of an educated girl; but there was a shakiness in it which suddenly destroyed all his wise resolutions, making an irresistible appeal to his chivalry. After all, he himself, if not actually an outcast, was one of life's failures. He had touched bed-rock, more than once, and he knew too much of the bitterness of life to judge either man or woman harshly. It is only those who have never suffered who show no mercy to others.

What was it that American girl had said to him in Iquique, when she insisted on lending him one hundred dollars, the time he was absolutely penniless and too weak from fever to refuse? "The best thanks you can give me, Jimmy, will be to help another girl if you ever get the chance." He had returned the money a couple of months later, and he had neither seen nor heard of her again; but the memory of her words had remained, and now he seized on them as an excuse for the course he wanted to follow. And so the slip of paper went back into his pocket-book, tucked in carefully, though he knew every word that was on it; and he sat down again, and remained, thinking and wondering, until the fire had ceased to show even a spark of red, and the chill of the room sent him shivering to bed, to dream of Lalage.

Jimmy came out of his room at nine o'clock next morning to find Mrs. Kelly sweeping the dining-room. "The cook has not come back yet," she remarked cheerfully. "I do hope the police haven't taken her, for she is really a treasure when she's sober. And I can't very well borrow the Harmers' servant again. So breakfast will be late; but you said last night you weren't in a hurry, and Douglas isn't either. Won't you have a whisky and soda, Mr. Grierson, whilst you're waiting. The decanter is on the sideboard, or it should be—oh, no, I remember, Douglas has got it in the dressing-room. I'll fetch it."

Breakfast was finally over about eleven o'clock. "We're not usually so late, though it's always a movable feast," Mrs. Kelly explained, and then Douglas prepared to go down to the office.

"They can always call me on the telephone if they want me specially," he remarked, "and showing my independence is part of my scheme. I don't think you'll ever be able to bluff, Jimmy. It isn't in you. At the back of your mind, really, you're staid and respectable, with a reverence for those set in authority over you, even for those who'll set themselves there. So you'll have to trust to the merit of your work alone, and it's a slow job getting recognition that way. What do you say, Dora?"

Mrs. Kelly smiled, and then suddenly her face grew grave, almost sad. "Yes, it is a slow job sometimes," she said, softly. "Only Mr. Grierson's old enough not to go under whilst he's waiting, and, of course, he has the knowledge. It's those raw boys from the provinces I pity." She shook her head as if at some memory, then followed her husband to the front door. "Come again, Mr. Grierson, won't you," she said as she shook hands. "Of course, you'll see Douglas often at the club, and if he gives me longer warning I'll make sure the cook doesn't get out. Douglas, dear, you might ask them at the police station if they've got her. I've got a kind of creepy feeling which tells me that they have, and, you know, the magistrate said he wouldn't fine her next time."

"You're lucky," Jimmy said abruptly, as they came down the steps of the mansions into the street.

Kelly looked up with a grin. "Do you mean in having our cook?"

Jimmy disregarded the question, and went on, "Were you lonely when you first came home, before you married? Did you have to go through it, or had you people of your own?"

He did not put it clearly, but the other showed he understood when he answered, "My people are all in the North, and they're Nonconformists and teetotallers. I went up once, and the governor and I quarrelled. I haven't seen them since. Dora's never seen them. We were married six months after I came home, on nothing. I wouldn't have risked it, but she insisted for my sake. I was at the old game, you know."

Jimmy nodded. He understood, remembering vividly certain wild drinking bouts which, incidentally, had given him some practical experience in newspaper work, for on more than one occasion he had taken Kelly's place, and brought out the little sheet.

They walked on a little way in silence, then, "Women are a confounded sight better than we are," Kelly jerked out. "They see so much further. We reckon we are being unselfish when we're only cowards; but they're ready to back their own opinion and run the risk; and when they win they let us take the credit."

"Some of them do, the right sort. But there are others——" Jimmy was thinking of the girls to whom Ethel Grimmer had introduced him, those whose parents had trained them in a due appreciation of the value of men of position.

Kelly stopped suddenly and looked at him anxiously. "James Grierson," he said, "I shall put you in a book some day when you're developed. At present you're about twenty-one years old in many respects. Probably you'll marry stodgily, or else you'll go to the other extreme and make an even bigger ass of yourself."

Jimmy flushed uncomfortably, remembering Lalage; then went hot at the thought of his own folly. He had only spoken to the girl once.



CHAPTER X

Lalage Penrose's flat was on the second floor of a small block of flats in a narrow and grimy street. Opposite the main entrance was a fried fish shop, and next door to that a coal and greengrocery stores, with the latest price per hundredweight of what were untruthfully called the "Best Household Coals" displayed in huge numerals on each of the windows. Unwashed children from the uncleanly houses which made up the rest of the street seemed to spend the whole day, and half the night, dancing to barrel organs. Garbage and paper littered the roadway, except where there was sufficient slimy black mud to cover these; but, on the other hand, there was a large and gaudy public house at the corner, opposite a similar block of flats, and a cab rank just down the side turning.

Lalage's flat consisted of three very small rooms, for which she paid fifty pounds a year. "Inclusive of rates," the agent had said; but, as the landlord himself was on the Borough Council, his assessment was, of course, not unduly high. By trade, the owner was a butcher in Maida Vale, though his friends in Tooting did not know that; moreover, besides being a councillor, he was a German by extraction; consequently, with these two qualifications, it was quite natural that he should own flats of that kind. In Capetown, where men are crude or brutal in their ways, a judge and jury between them would probably have assessed his merits at fifty lashes and two years' hard labour; in London, on the other hand, not only was his person sacred and his property safe from police raids, but he also had reasonable grounds for expecting to be mayor in due course—which often meant a knighthood—whilst even the greatest prize of all, the chairmanship of the new Electricity Committee, a body having the giving of six-figure contracts, was not beyond his grasp. He was quite a personage in the municipal life of West London, as well as in the social life of Tooting, and, being a married man with a family, he treated his tenants with righteous severity, distraining on the slightest excuse when he suspected they possessed anything of value, knowing well that his victims would not dare seek redress in the Courts.

It was four o'clock exactly when Jimmy knocked at the door of the flat, which was opened by Lalage herself. "I've no servant," she explained, "only a woman who comes in once or twice a week." Then she led the way into the tiny slip of a sitting-room, where she had tea laid out. "I'm glad you've come," she added, "I was half afraid you wouldn't."

"Why?" he asked with a smile.

She looked at him seriously, her head a little on one side, as though she were trying to read his character. "You seemed shy, different from most men. Are you an Englishman?"

He nodded, and gave her a brief sketch of who he was. She listened with evident interest. "It must be splendid to travel and see things. I have always longed to, at least I did once, but now——" She broke off with a hopeless little sigh, and got up abruptly. "I'll fetch the tea now."

The tea things, like everything else in the place, were of the simplest, cheapest kind, yet as tasteful as was possible considering their price; but, on the other hand, the tea itself was good, and there was a plate of daintily-cut bread and butter and another of sandwiches.

"I was so glad of that tea yesterday." Lalage looked up suddenly. "I hadn't had anything since some bread and milk at breakfast time, and that horrible black man made me feel quite shaky."

Jimmy frowned. "Why do you starve yourself in that way?" he asked.

In after years, he often thought of this question and her answer. He had been hungry himself more than once, and he knew, only too well, what it meant; but, somehow, he had never pictured a well-dressed girl as suffering that way.

"I only had a penny left, the one I spent on that bun, and no one will trust you with as much as a loaf round here. I was afraid you would notice how greedy I was at tea." Then, as he flushed awkwardly and began to speak, she stopped him with a little gesture. "Why should you have thought of it? You were very good, as it was. And I'm all right now. I got a postal order last night," she added rather hurriedly; then she changed the subject abruptly, and went on to talk of one or two matters of passing interest, which the papers had been booming for want of anything of real importance. She had evidently received an average education, Jimmy could see that plainly, and yet he was puzzled, for in many of her ideas, and especially in her strong prejudices, she belied her apparent age; for they were those of a child of fourteen, rather than of a girl of some two or three and twenty. Insensibly, he found himself listening to her as one would to a child, and then, a moment later, she would bring out some cynical scrap of wisdom, evidently the fruit of bitter experience, which sounded strange coming from her lips. Yet, despite the utter unconventionality, there was no hint of fastness about her, and even when she touched by implication on her way of life, she did so with a kind of frank simplicity, hiding nothing and trying to excuse nothing.

"What do you think of my little flat?" she asked suddenly, after what had been rather a long pause. "It's very tiny, of course; but it's a home, and when you've had nowhere to go to, not even a lodging——" She broke off, and stared into the fire. "It's simply awful to have nowhere," she went on after a while. "To walk about hour after hour with the mud squelching through your shoes, and nothing to eat; and getting more hopeless as midnight comes on. I was out two whole nights."

Jimmy breathed heavily; he had often heard the same sort of thing from men; but it sounded very different coming from the lips of a girl.

"And then one day I got ten pounds," Lalage continued, "and I made up my mind I would have a home. I paid a month's rent in advance—they don't worry over references if you do that—and I went to some hire-purchase people for furniture. Then I bought a kettle at the sixpenny halfpenny shop, and a cup and saucer and plate in the next street, where the barrows are. By the time I had got curtains and some sheets and one or two odd things like a lamp, there were only a few shillings left." She looked up seriously. "You wouldn't think till you try how expensive furnishing is; but I was so proud of my little home. I am still; and you know, when you've a place of your own, if you only have bread and milk no one is any the wiser. I've often been hard up since, but I've always managed to scrape up the rent and the hire-purchase instalment. One must do that; they don't give you a day's grace."

Jimmy was chewing savagely at the ends of his moustache. It never entered into his head that she was trying to play upon his sympathies. There was some curious quality of simplicity in her manner which forbade that supposition. She interested him as no woman had ever interested him before, and, suddenly, he was filled with a desire to know her past, and, in that, to find excuses for the present.

"Where do you come from?" he asked.

"Hampshire," she answered, adding, "My people are dead. I'm quite alone in the world." Then, as if to change the subject, she got up from her seat. "You must have a look round my tiny place."

Jimmy felt almost guilty as he noted her obvious pride in the few little articles she had collected together. May's cook would have rejected with scorn the kettle from the sixpenny halfpenny bazaar, and the one or two pots and pans which had since been bought at the same shop; whilst none of the Marlow servants would have deigned to use the thick earthenware plates on the dresser. Yet everywhere there was a perfect cleanliness, which, possibly, those same servants would never have succeeded in attaining in the smoke-laden atmosphere of that street.

"I do hate dirt and untidiness," Lalage explained when he made a remark on the subject. "I do everything myself, except the scrubbing; and I wouldn't have a woman in for that if it wasn't for my hands; I want to keep them nice."

She held them out for Jimmy to inspect, with the first touch of vanity he had seen in her. Perhaps, her pride was justifiable, for they were well worth looking at, being small and perfectly shaped. She wore no rings, nor, for the matter of that, any jewellery at all, whilst her dress was of the simplest.

When they went back to the sitting-room he asked her the time. "I never carry a watch," he said. "Mine went the way of a good many other things when I was first knocked out with fever, and I've never managed to afford another one."

Lalage nodded with sympathetic comprehension. "I know; but it's worst when you've nothing left to pawn. As for clothes, they give you nothing on them, at least round here. But you want to know the time." She opened the window and listened a moment. "It's just on six. I can hear the periwinkle man coming, and he's never late. This is the last part of his round, you see, because he doesn't expect to sell much here; then he goes to a stall for the evening. I know them all, and I think they like me, because I chat to them. But the people in the other flats," she shook her head with an air of disgust, "most of them are dreadful; a lot of horrid foreigners, you know. Still, the caretaker sees they don't fight on the stairs, and when I shut my door, I feel I shut them all out."

Jimmy smiled a little grimly; he could picture those other tenants and their ways. Then, "Will you put your hat on, and we'll go out and get some dinner?"

She reflected a moment. "Why not get something and bring it in here? It won't cost nearly so much, though it will be much nicer. Oh, in six months I've got simply to loathe the smell of a cafe. There's a nice ham and beef shop where we can get everything we want." She laughed rather ruefully. "I remember yesterday when I was so hungry looking in there and wishing I could get a roast chicken they had, all beautiful and brown, you know, with jelly on it. But they wouldn't have trusted me with even a quarter of a pound of beef. I suppose they've been robbed so often. Well, I'll put on my hat, and we'll get what we want. Really, honestly, I would much sooner have it like that than go to one of the best restaurants. Don't you yourself think cafes are hateful?"

Jimmy watched her marketing with a distinct sense of admiration. She knew the local price of everything, and she insisted on having exactly what she ordered.

"I don't see why they should rob you," she said. "They make huge profits anyway. Now, I think that's all we want." She ticked the articles off on her fingers. "Oh, unless you care for something to drink.... Yes, I like a whisky and soda with my meals; but don't get a whole bottle, it's only a waste; and they will sell it you by the quartern in that public house. I'll wait whilst you go in. But don't buy a bottle; I know you haven't got any money to throw away?" she added.

When he came out, she noted, with evident satisfaction, that he had obeyed her. "This will make a lovely supper," she declared, and her smile showed she meant it. "I like shopping like this. It's always nicer than a cafe, and much less expensive."

Her last remark reminded him of what she had said just as he was going in for the whisky.

"Why do you think I haven't got any money to throw away?" he asked.

She gave a wise little nod. "You tell me you write, and I know literary men never have anything to spare."

Jimmy laughed. "How do you know?"

Lalage turned away. "Never mind, but I do know, only too well."



CHAPTER XI

"I have not heard from you for several days," Mrs. Marlow wrote to Jimmy, "though I have had a couple of letters from Eliza Benn, who says that for two consecutive nights you did not come home. The first night you wired to her, but the second time she sat up until after midnight, fearing lest it might not be safe to let you have a light. I need not say how annoying it is to hear these things from one's former servants. Both Henry and I trust that you are not already getting into dissipated ways, and that you will remember that you belong to a respectable family, which will have to bear a large share of any disgrace into which you may fall, or be led." Then there was a postscript. "Eliza Benn is a person for whom I have a great regard; and I hear that her husband holds quite an excellent situation in Mr. Grimmer's salesrooms, where he is paid thirty-five shillings a week, which, Henry says, would only be given to a most experienced and steady man."

Jimmy tore the letter across savagely and tossed it into the fire. It annoyed him the more because his sister had got within measurable distance of the truth, at least from her point of view. He had already had some uncomfortable moments over the thought of what the family would say if it ever came to know of Lalage. He had not seen the latter again, but, though it was less than forty-eight hours since they had parted, he had written to her twice, and he could not disguise from himself the fact that she filled his life to the exclusion of all else. No other woman had ever appealed to him in the same way. Lalage had gripped his imagination. He could remember every word she had said, and, having been on the rocks himself, he could understand what she had suffered—the rain squelching through the thin little shoes, the bitter loneliness of the great city, the meals of bread and milk which had to last the whole day, the passionate longing for a home of some sort. He did not attempt to argue the thing out logically, as a Grierson would have done. The thought of her way of life inspired him, not with the scorn or loathing a man of position would have felt, even when taking advantage of it, but with a terrible, gnawing jealousy. Probably, he would not have admitted, even to himself, that he was in love, for, somehow, the phrase seemed hopelessly inapplicable. It belonged to the Grierson part of his nature, and was supposed to signify a preliminary to marriage, an altogether decorous kind of affection for a decorously-behaved girl, who had never been homeless or hungry or cold. All he cared for now was to get Lalage away, to be with her always, and, for the moment at least, anything which did not help towards that end seemed of absolutely no importance. He had thrust family considerations on one side, thrust on one side all those good resolutions, or rather those revived instincts of the past, which had been uppermost in his mind when he first came home. His own world, the Griersons and Marlows and Grimmers, would have called him either mad or hopelessly immoral, according to the degree of charity latent in their respective natures; Kelly would have warned him bluntly not to endanger his prospects by being a fool; a mental specialist would have explained that the shock of John Locke's death, coming on top of the ten years of almost continual overstrain in bad climates, had temporarily affected his balance, an opinion with which Lalage herself would have agreed, knowing, after all, nothing of men's love; but neither opinions nor diagnosis would have altered Jimmy's determination.

He had put in two days of almost savagely hard work. Without money he would be helpless. True, most of his manuscripts had come back; but still three had actually appeared in print, and he could feel he had made a start. The old semi-indifference on the question of his ultimate success or failure had vanished completely. He was in deadly earnest now; Lalage should have no more bread-and-milk days, if he could help it.

Mrs. Marlow's letter had arrived by the first delivery, in the cheerful company of a returned manuscript. He had heard from Lalage, her first letter to him, the evening before, and he did not expect another till that night; but when the second postman knocked at the door, and, a moment later, Mrs. Benn came creaking upstairs, he hurried to meet her, hoping the envelope might bear the West London postmark. But he was doomed to disappointment. The letter was from Ida, his sister in Northampton. "When I heard from you last week you said any day this week would do," Ida Fenton wrote. "We find we shall be able to have you to-morrow, and hope you will stay four or five days. The best train is one at 2:15, and I will meet you by that, so you need not worry about answering this note. We are all looking forward to seeing you, and though, of course Joseph is at business all day, and the children at school, I daresay you will find the rest do you good."

Jimmy frowned as he folded it up and put it back into the envelope. He had arranged to spend the next day with Lalage; they were going to have a run out somewhere—"somewhere inexpensive, like the Crystal Palace," Lalage had said in her letter—and then they were going to have another of those delightful marketing expeditions in the grimy street where the barrows were. Now, all that would have to be postponed. Jimmy would not have scrupled greatly about disappointing Ida—she had been in no hurry to see him—but May's letter had shown him how he was being watched and his doings reported, and he did not want to arouse further suspicion. He intended to move very shortly, though his plans were as yet but half formed, and, moreover, he shrank from doing anything which would offend May. He might not be afraid of his relations; but at the back of his mind he was sufficiently conscious of his own departure from the paths of rectitude to feel the weakness of his position.

He wrote to Lalage that evening, explaining matters; consequently, she was not surprised when he came up next morning carrying a handbag. At first, it struck him that she was looking rather pale and worried, but she greeted him with frank pleasure, and, in a few minutes, she was her usual self again. As Jimmy learned later, she had in a peculiar degree the art of seeing the best side of things. In a sense, she was almost a fatalist, and though she made no disguise about the regret she felt for her ruined life, a moment later she always seemed to put the regrets aside as useless. "I try to keep as respectable as I can," she said to Jimmy.

Normal people, being respectable themselves, would probably have sneered, knowing that those who have fallen are all on the level, and that only in those far-off days when He who pitied the Magdalen and bade the sinless cast the first stone trod the earth was there forgiveness for this greatest of sins. But Jimmy, not being normal, and being anxious to find excuses for Lalage, did not sneer, and before long he found that, though she might not be able to rise again, she was determined to fall no lower. She was almost fastidious in her hatred of bad language, and there was, as a matter of fact, an immeasurable distance between her and the German women who formed the majority of the other tenants.

"Of course I am sorry to have to go away," Lalage said in answer to Jimmy's complaints of having to go to Northampton. "But still, it's only right. Your own people ought to come first, and I shall see you when you get back, if you haven't forgotten me."

Jimmy took both her hands in his. "I shall never forget you, Lalage, never."

She shook her head. "Others have said the same, and have forgotten, none the less. I'm afraid to hope too much sometimes, for fear of disappointment. It's easier when you haven't expected anything." She freed her hands and went across to the window, where she stood, apparently staring at the gigantic telephone post on the roof opposite.

Jimmy came up behind her. "Would you be sorry if I were to forget?" he asked.

She answered without looking round, "Of course I should."

"Why would you be sorry?" he went on.

"Because I like you very much. You are always gentlemanly and nice in your ways." Still she did not face him.

"Do you like anyone else, anyone at all?" Jimmy's voice was not very steady.

"No, no." Now she turned her head, and he saw that her eyes were wet. "There's no one I like. I don't know why I've told you things, only, somehow, you seemed to understand how hard life is; and you don't treat me——" she paused as though looking for a word, "you don't treat me lightly. You're careful to raise your hat and open the door for me, and all those little things, just as though I were," her voice broke slightly, "a good girl."

Jimmy coloured, and muttered something which Lalage did not catch, then, suddenly, she gave a little gasp of annoyance. "Jimmy, you left your bag in the hall, and it's got your name on it. The charwoman was cleaning the kitchen and now she's out in the hall. Do get it at once."

He obeyed her with obvious surprise, then looked at her inquiringly. "Blackmail," she answered simply. "All these women round here do it if they get a chance, and they say the landlord puts them up to it. Everyone about here preys on us, in one way or another. The district lives on us, tradesmen, landlords, agents, even the gas and electric light people; and when they've bled us dry they seize our homes and turn us out. They know we can't go to law, and yet whilst they're robbing us they're sitting as guardians or councillors and going to chapel every Sunday. They treat us like dirt, and their wives and daughters shake their skirts at us, and all the time it's we who earn the money for them."

Jimmy went over to the mantelpiece, and buried his head on his hands. He was wholly unconscious of what he was doing, being too miserable to think of appearances. Lalage watched him a moment, then put her arm gently round his neck, and, for the first time, kissed him of her own accord.

"What is it, dear, tell me," she said.

"I can't stand it. The whole thing's horrible, abominable." It was the man's voice which was broken now.

"You can't help it, Jimmy dear," she answered sadly. "It's too late now. There's no road back in these things. It's my own fault, and I must pay for it."

"There must be a way out," he answered fiercely. "I will find it when I can get this wretched visit over. You can't go on like this."

She tried to soothe him down, almost as a mother soothes a child. "All right, dear, you shall find it when you come back. We'll see what can be done."

Lalage went down to the station to see him off. They arrived in plenty of time, and when he had taken his ticket they went into the refreshment booth for some sandwiches. They sat down, and for a minute or two, neither said anything. Then, suddenly, Jimmy turned to her.

"How are you off for money, Lalage?" he asked.

The girl coloured slightly. "Quite all right, thanks," she answered after a moment's hesitation. "Really I am, Jimmy, and, anyway, I wouldn't let you run yourself short."

But he was not satisfied. "Are you sure? Take some in case of accidents."

She shook her head. "No, there's no need. I shall be able to pull along."

He gave in reluctantly. "Well, you've got my address. Let me know if you do get short, because I should hate to think——" He broke off abruptly, then went on. "Promise you'll let me know."

Lalage nodded. "Yes, I promise."



CHAPTER XII

Ida Fenton, Jimmy's younger sister, was a tall, fair woman with a beautiful profile and hazel-blue eyes. Women who did not like her called her a stick, and even her friends admitted that she was severe. Stiffness was the dominant note in her character. Most men, including even her husband, wondered that she had ever married. In pre-Reformation times she would certainly have been a nun, and probably a saint, being passionless, and therefore able to avoid all carnal sins without effort. However, she belonged to an age which regarded marriage as the one vocation for women, at least for those of position, and she had accepted Joseph Fenton, if not with enthusiasm, at least with satisfaction. He appeared to fulfil all the necessary conditions, and she had never found reason to regret her choice. If Fenton himself sometimes appeared hurt at the fact that she did not display more outward affection towards him or the children, she seldom worried over the matter, being fully conscious of her own rectitude of conduct and feeling.

Jimmy felt chilled the moment he entered the Fenton house. Ida's own personality seemed to be reflected in everything, in the furniture, in the pictures, and above all in the unnaturally tidy children to whom he was presently introduced. He could still feel the one cold kiss which Ida had given him, and, when he was shown up to his room, he unconsciously gave the spot an extra dab with the sponge.

The weather was bitter, yet there was no fire in the big spare room, Ida holding that fires in bedrooms were unhealthy and extravagant, consequently, being still thin blooded as a result of ten years in tropical climates, he was shivering when he got downstairs again.

"Can I have a little whisky, Joe?" he said to his brother-in-law, whom he found in the smoking-room. "I've got a bit of a chill on me, and it takes very little to bring out my malaria."

Ida, who had just entered, frowned slightly. "Ammoniated quinine would do you more good, Jimmy. Joseph himself never drinks between meals. It's such a bad example if the children happen to come in."

Jimmy stifled a retort to the effect that the obvious course was to keep the children out; but he refused the proffered quinine and helped himself to some of the whisky which his brother-in-law had already produced.

Ida sighed and went out, whereupon Fenton lost no time in making use of the second glass which was on the tray.

"Ida likes giving people ammoniated quinine," he remarked.

Jimmy nodded sympathetically, knowing his sister of old. She had managed their father's household during the period between their mother's death and her own marriage, and he still had lively recollections of her regime.

Dinner was a dreary meal. Fenton, who was essentially a cheerful person, made several spasmodic attempts at conversation, but Ida, cold and beautiful, seemed to check him by her own silence; whilst Jimmy was thinking of Lalage, contrasting the luxury of his present surroundings, the massive plate, the costly dinner service, the deferential, silently-moving butler, with Lalage's little room, and its hire-purchase furniture, earthenware plates, and the meal bought at the ham and beef shop. Now, he was amongst his own people, a Grierson come back to the Griersons; and yet he hated it all, because he had reached the point of wanting to share everything with Lalage, whom he could never hope to introduce into houses like the Fentons'.

The long meal came to an end at last, and they went into the smoking-room, where Ida joined them. Mrs. Fenton had asked no questions at dinner, when the servants were present, but Jimmy quickly found that there were many things she wanted to know, not about the past, but about his doings since he had come home, and about his plans for the future. In a flash, he understood that May must have arranged this sudden invitation to Northampton, and he was on his guard at once. Inwardly, he was furious and a little uneasy, foreseeing the possibility of future trouble; but he kept both his temper and his composure, and in the end he lulled Ida's suspicions. When she had gone, Fenton himself breathed a sigh, which sounded curiously like one of relief, and, pulling out a couple of big volumes in the bottom shelf of the bookcase, produced a bottle of whisky of a brand greatly superior to that which stood on the tray.

"She doesn't like to see it go too fast." He motioned towards the other bottle.

Jimmy nodded sympathetically, understanding; then helped himself.

"They're afraid of you going the pace." Joseph Fenton jerked the words out, looking away almost guiltily.

Once more Jimmy nodded. He liked this brother-in-law, always had liked him, knowing him to be a man, and, for a moment, he felt inclined to tell him of Lalage; but, before he could make up his mind, Joseph went on:

"They don't understand, Jimmy—Ida and May and my own sisters too. Yet, hang it all, in a way I suppose they're right, because of the kids, you know." He tossed his cigar into the grate and lighted another, rather carefully. "You fellows who have knocked about, you get ideas and ways——. But, they won't do here, Jimmy, believe me." He paused again, to help himself to another whisky, then went on, hurriedly, "This work of yours, it's a bit uphill. Are you all right for cash? If not come to me."

Jimmy flushed. He wanted some money badly, how badly only a man in his position, the lover of Lalage, could know; but still he could not take it from Fenton, for that purpose. Joseph would never understand his motives. So he stood up, suddenly.

"Thanks, very much, Joe; but I can rub along, at least I think so. If I am dead stuck, I will come to you; but I believe I can pull through." Then he said good night, and went upstairs, to think of Lalage, and to curse his own idiocy in not taking the proffered loan. Twenty pounds would have been nothing to his brother-in-law, yet to Lalage and himself it would have meant a new start. Before he lay down he had made up his mind to ask Joseph for it, after all, and he went to sleep with that resolution in his mind; but when he awoke in the morning things somehow seemed different, and before breakfast was over he had changed his mind. This was his world, and these were his own people, living ordered lives, with soles and grilled kidneys for breakfast, and family plate on the table, knowing nothing of ham and beef shops, or of milkmen who demanded cash in exchange for their milk. He belonged to them, he was one of them, sharing their principles and their prejudices, worshipping their gods, as his ancestors and theirs had done. What real kinship had he with Lalage, who made her breakfast tea out of a quarter-pound packet bought the evening before at the little general shop round the corner, and took an obvious delight in the sixpenny haddock they had purchased off the barrow with the glaring oil lamps over it?

And yet, when the postman brought him no letter from that same Lalage, he grew silent and restless, as his sister's eyes were quick to note. When Joseph had departed to his office, he himself went to the smoking-room and wrote three whole sheets to the girl who lived in the flat, for the first time throwing all prudence to the winds, and saying the things he felt. His pen travelled quickly, and, whilst he was writing, he forgot all about his surroundings, his mind being full of Lalage. When, at last, he had finished and signed his name, in full, as a sign of his trust in her, disdaining any subterfuge, he looked round the luxuriously furnished room, and for an instant he was filled with a sense of his own folly; then, hurriedly, as though ashamed of what he was doing, he thrust the letter into an envelope and sealed it down, afterwards posting it with his own hands.

The hours dragged by slowly. The Marlow house had seemed dull; but the Fentons' was almost unbearable. Ida meant to be kind; but, perhaps, because she tried to show her intention, she only succeeded in making Jimmy feel his position as a poor relation. She took him for a drive in the afternoon to call on one or two elderly ladies in reduced circumstances, whom she patronised unconsciously, greatly to the discomfort of her brother, who had a kind of fellow feeling for her victims. Yet, on the other hand, he was conscious of a grim admiration for Ida; she was so sure of her own rectitude, so convinced that her husband's wealth—which meant her own position—entitled her to lecture and to interfere. It was all interesting, even amusing, or it would have been so, had Lalage never come into his life, in which case he could have regarded Mrs. Fenton from a more or less impersonal point of view. Now, however, she was a possible danger, to be guarded against, and—though he did not like to put it that way—to be lied to, if occasion demanded.

That night, Jimmy hardly closed his eyes, being occupied with the problem of inventing an excuse for getting back to town. The evening post had brought him no letters; and, though it was improbable that Lalage would have any real news for him, he was terribly worried at her silence. Lying then through the long hours, praying for the sleep which would not come to ease him from the hideous pain of jealousy, he suffered as few men can suffer in their lives. He had no right to control Lalage, no more claim on her than anyone else had, he was mad to trouble about her, knowing what he did of her, and having ten years' experience of women behind him. Yet he lay there, wide-eyed, wondering, and tormenting himself. Twice he got up and endeavoured to smoke a cigarette, but all to no purpose. The tobacco tasted rank, and, after a few whiffs, he let the thing go out. When, towards morning, he did fall into a heavy sleep, it was only to dream of Lalage, with the mud and rain squelching through her shoes, looking for someone to give her shelter.



CHAPTER XIII

If Ida felt any relief when, at the end of four miserably long days, Jimmy returned to town, she did not say so, even to her husband. It had been a trial in many ways, but, at the same time, she was conscious of having done her duty. She had impressed her brother with a sense of what he owed to the family in the matter of conduct, and his very depression seemed to show that he had taken the matter to heart.

"Jimmy's nerves are all wrong. He's like a man on wires. He wants a comfortable home and a wife to look after him," Fenton ventured to remark whilst his brother-in-law was upstairs, packing; but Ida brushed the theory aside scornfully.

"I am surprised at you, Joseph. It is not at all the way to speak of marriage. The Griersons have always waited until they were in a position to marry, and have never held those disgusting ideas of nerves and so on. Jimmy most emphatically cannot think of marrying for many years to come. He is perfectly well, or he would be if he did not smoke and drink so much. He has the remedy in his own hands."

Fenton shrugged his shoulders and turned away, wondering inwardly whether the Grierson strain would predominate in his own children. He almost wished Jimmy had not come down. It was annoying to be disturbed and made to think after having got out of the habit of so doing.

The men and women of the type Ida usually invited to the house never worried him in that way, belonging as they did to the class which can afford to take its theories as facts.

Jimmy had heard once from Lalage, a brief little note, just acknowledging his letters, and telling him nothing. Mrs. Fenton had watched carefully whilst he was reading it—she had detected a woman's handwriting—but he had managed to keep his composure, and then, the better to deceive her, he had rolled the paper into a ball and tossed it on to the fire, though it cut him to the heart to part with anything which had once been Lalage's.

He had hoped the girl would have been waiting for him at the station; but he failed to see her tall figure on the platform, so, jumping into a cab, he told the driver to take him to the mansions. However, as they went up the last street, he caught sight of Lalage coming out of a hairdresser's shop. A moment later he was beside her.

Jimmy's first impression was one of delight at the look of genuine pleasure which, had come into her eyes; then he noted with concern how worn and pale she looked.

"I didn't expect you quite so soon," she said. "I must have made a mistake in the time, and I wanted to get my hair done nicely before you got back."

"What has been the matter with you? Why didn't you write, dear?" he asked.

She parried the questions until they got inside the flat, when he repeated them, holding her hands, and looking into her eyes. She tried to avoid his scrutiny.

"I've been all right," she answered, "only there was nothing to write about."

But he would not be put off like that, and at last, with a sob, she told him. "It's over now, and I didn't mean you to know. I—I've had the brokers in." She was speaking hurriedly, in a low voice. "You see, someone has been paying my rent, and I expected it the day you went away—it should have come that morning—and it was due next day. I never heard, and I only had a few shillings, so they put the brokers in at once. These landlords always do."

Jimmy cursed silently. "Why didn't you wire to me? You know I would have sent it at once."

She shook her head. "No, no. I hate taking money from you, above everyone."

"What did you do in the end?"

She looked up and faced him, with a kind of desperate courage. "I got it by going away for two days. It's no good disguising things, trying to make out that I don't."

It was a question which was the paler, the man or the woman. It had come home to him, as it had never done before. He dropped her hands and went over to the window, where he stood very still, staring out with absolutely unseeing eyes; whilst she watched him with a deadly pain at her heart, thinking she had killed the love which she knew had grown up in him.

"Perhaps it's best, after all, perhaps it's best." She tried desperately hard to say the words to herself, then, almost unconsciously, she took a step towards him. Possibly her action altered the whole course of two lives, for, like a flash, he turned round, seized her in his arms, and covered her face with kisses.

"I don't care, now I've come back, because it'll never happen again, it can't happen again, and what went before has nothing to do with me. We'll start afresh, dearest, we'll start afresh." He repeated the words several times, savagely, as though wishing to assure himself that it would be so.

Lalage was crying on his shoulder, sobbing quietly without noise or movement, as overwrought women do; but it was soon over, and she pulled herself together bravely.

"I think you're very tired and we had better have some tea now," she said, smiling at him with wet eyes. He kissed away her tears, then released her, and sat down whilst she hurried into the kitchen to prepare the tray.

It was very much later, in fact not until after they had finished the supper, which she insisted should come from the next street—"Because it was so nice last time," she explained—that he went back to the subject of their future. He was so desperately in earnest that he succeeded in blinding himself to the financial difficulties ahead; and, though perhaps he did not convince either Lalage or himself, they were both in the mood to risk things.

"I'll give up my rooms at Mrs. Benn's, thankfully, and we can take some others, somewhere near Fleet Street, until we can get on our feet," he went on.

But Lalage demurred. "I can't give up this flat, at least not without losing all I've paid on the furniture, until the end of my agreement, in six months' time. Why shouldn't we stay on here?"

Jimmy frowned. He loathed the place and all its associations, but he was not in a position to give her another home of her own, as yet, and he could not answer her argument, especially when she added:

"I can tell them at the agent's office that we are married, and we can give them some name or other."

She said it simply, without the least intention of hurting him; but the words cut him like a whip, for though, for one mad moment, he had thought of marriage, real marriage, he had put the idea on one side as utterly impossible. He was a Grierson, owing a duty to the family, and he could not do the thing. Only he had the grace not even to hint of it to her, and she gave no sign that she had the least expectation of any promise from him. She had recovered her spirits, and, apparently, was quite content with the arrangement he proposed. He was fully conscious that Society would condemn him unsparingly, if it found out, and he could not justify his own conduct, even to himself; but Lalage never seemed to consider the moral aspect of the question, that curious element of irresponsibility, almost childishness, which he had marked at the very outset, was now more noticeable than ever.

Suddenly, a new fear gripped him. "It will never do to give my people this address," he said. "They would make inquiries at once, and then——" He gave a grim little smile.

Lalage's face grew hard. "Why should they hunt you like that? If they really cared, they would have looked after you, instead of sending you to those lodgings. They want you to be like a little boy, to do just what they say, and never to have a mind of your own—oh, yes, but they do. They ought to have seen that after all you've been through, you need care and love."

He looked up with a queer light in his eyes. "Do you love me, Lalage? You've never said so."

"I like you very, very much," she answered.

But he was not satisfied. "Do you love me?" he repeated.

"I like you better, much better, than anyone else I ever met," and with that he had to be content.



CHAPTER XIV

"I know someone who will let you a room, just as an address, in case those horrid sisters of yours make inquiries." Lalage turned round suddenly from the looking-glass, her hands still busy with her hair.

"Who is she? Where does she live?" Jimmy asked lazily, being at the moment more interested in that same hair than in anything else.

"She lives just the other side of Baker Street, and really she's a kind of agent, you know." Lalage made a gesture of supreme disgust. "But she's not so bad as most of them, and, as her husband is a clerk in the Council office, anyone would tell your people that the house is quite respectable. Why, it belongs to the mayor himself."

Jimmy frowned. He loathed the idea of putting himself in the hands of people of that sort, people who would understand exactly how matters stood, and judge, not only himself, but Lalage as well, according to their own standards.

"I would sooner we had nothing whatever to do with any of them," he said.

He was touching mud for the first time in his life, real mud, and he did not like the feeling of it. Moreover, he had suddenly grown very particular about Lalage. They might not be married, in fact he had decided that there could be no question of marriage between them; but, none the less, as long as he was going under another name, he wanted people to believe they had legalised their union, and to respect Lalage accordingly. Had he not belonged to a family of position, he might have seen himself as a coward or a cad; but the Griersons were essentially of the Victorian age, and so he was able to quiet his conscience with platitudes; whilst under the seeming calmness with which Lalage had accepted his proposal, she was too glad of any change from the nightmare of the past to be very critical. She hoped—that was all, resolutely refusing to allow herself any fears or misgivings. And, after all, Jimmy was very young so far as these things were concerned, and Lalage was even younger; so, probably, they would not have listened to, much less have believed, anyone who had warned them that they were attempting the impossible. They were happy at the moment, having put the past behind them, and they were ready to assume that their happiness would last, ignoring its dangerous insecure foundations.

In the end, Lalage had her way, so far as the room was concerned. Mrs. Fagin, the landlady, scenting money easily earned, was absolutely servile. Jimmy stammered a little over his explanations, but Lalage put things more plainly. "He will seldom be here; in fact I do not think he will ever actually need the room," she said. "But it will be an address for his letters, and you will know what to say if there are any inquiries. What would be your terms?"

Mrs. Fagin looked at Jimmy, as if to get his measure. "I'm sure I don't know, sir," she began. "We haven't had that same thing before, but——."

"He will pay three shillings a week," Lalage interrupted, "and begin next week. That should suit you, Mrs. Fagin. Very well," and she sailed out.

Jimmy looked at her admiringly. "You do know how to deal with them, Lalage," he remarked.

She sighed a little wearily. "I've had to learn that, and a good many other things, since I came to town."

Down at the apartment house in the dreary suburban street, Mrs. Benn accepted a week's notice from Jimmy with a sniff of anger.

"Very well, sir. You know your own business best, though Mrs. Marlow did say as how you would be permanent. Without that, I shouldn't have gone out of my way to give you our own best room, and to wear my health, which is not too good, out in making you comfortable. But then, Mrs. Marlow was evidently mistook all round, for she said you would keep respectable hours and act as such."

Whereupon Jimmy lost his temper, paid her a week in lieu of notice, and went straight back to Lalage, who received him with delight. "So you haven't changed your mind at the last moment, as you would have done if you had been wise, and good and," she laughed mischievously, "Grierson-like."

"All I care about is being good to you, sweetheart," he answered. "But why do you say 'Grierson-like'?"

She looked at him critically, her head a little on one side. "Because you're two men—James Grierson, who is stodgy and respectable and ought to marry what the other Griersons call a good girl, that is one with money; and Jimmy, who is awfully sweet and unselfish, just the opposite to James. Just now, you're Jimmy, the nice side of you is uppermost; but some day it may be the other way about and then you'll run off and leave poor Lalage."

He flushed, and tried to draw her to him. "Never, never," he declared. "I shall always stick to you. Who else have I got?"

She shook her head. "You've got your own people, always, ready to have you, when you'll be one of them; whilst I'm all alone, and only Lalage, the girl you met by chance in Oxford Street."

Her words reawakened his curiosity as to her past. Twice before he had tried to learn her story, but now, as on those occasions, she baffled his questions.

"I am Lalage Penrose, that's all. I was a fool, and I've paid for my folly, and there's nothing else worth telling."

"Still, I should like to hear," he persisted.

"Well, perhaps you shall some day, if you don't turn into James Grierson before then. But—but, don't ask me, Jimmy." Her bantering manner changed suddenly, and with a queer little sob she jumped up and hurried into the other room.

Jimmy did not try to follow her. Instead, he lighted a cigarette, and endeavoured to settle down to work on an article which had been suggested by a paragraph in that morning's Record. A quarter of an hour later Lalage came back with a little bundle of his socks in her hand.

"These want darning," she remarked; then, in the most natural manner, she sat down in the big wicker chair beside him, and started to ply her needle.

From time to time Jimmy glanced up from his writing. He was breaking the moral code in which he had been brought up, the code which he knew, as every sane man does know, is essentially right in principle; he was risking a rupture with his own people who, certainly, would never tolerate Lalage; he was face to face with an ugly financial situation, almost penniless himself and with another dependent on him; and yet he felt more at peace than he had done for many months past. Lalage, intent on her needlework, frowning prettily over the large holes in his socks, looked so sweet and girlish, so entirely unsoiled, outwardly at least, by what she had been through, that it seemed as if, after all, there could be nothing wrong. Marriage was only a formality, he told himself, and from that time on he tried to school himself to think so, almost succeeding after a while.

When his article was finished, Jimmy glanced through it rapidly, made one or two corrections, scrawled his signature at the foot, then turned to Lalage. "What is the time, dear? Have any of your clock-men come down the street lately?"

She looked up with a smile. "Yes, the watercress man, which means five o'clock. Have you finished now?"

Jimmy nodded. "I thought of taking it down to the office now. It's topical, so there's just a chance they'll use it to-night. Will you come too?"

"Of course," she answered. "We can get a motor 'bus at the end of the street, and it'll be a nice little run out. Besides, it'll be lucky if I go with you. They'll be sure to take it. I've a feeling I shall bring you luck. Don't you think so yourself?"

He kissed her lightly on the hair. "I'm sure you will, sweetheart. And we want lots of luck just now."

"What a dirty place and what a grumpy old man!" Lalage remarked as they came out of the Record office, after handing the envelope to the surly porter, who had taken it with an inarticulate growl and tossed it to a waiting boy. "Still, if they use it and they're good to you, I don't mind how dusty their passage is, or how bad tempered the porter looks."

Jimmy pressed her arm. "Good to us, you mean, don't you?"

She laughed. "Yes, good to us, I should say now." In the morning Jimmy was out early to buy a copy of the paper; and, as she opened the door to him, his radiant face told her the news.

"They've used it," he said, unnecessarily.

She laughed softly. "I felt sure they would. You see Lalage is lucky to you already."



CHAPTER XV

"That last article of yours I used was a very good one, and I shall always be glad to see anything you like to submit; but the amount of space we can give to foreign stuff, however good, is limited, and I do not like to have the same signature more than three or four times a month," Dodgson wrote, in returning Jimmy's next manuscript.

Jimmy passed the letter to Lalage. "Not very encouraging, is it dear?"

The girl read it through. "Oh, I think so. Three or four months means six or eight guineas from one paper alone, and then, you see, there are so many others. I'm sure you'll do well, because you're very, very clever, and because you're good to Lalage."

"Will that bring me luck?" he asked, smiling.

"Of course," she answered. "Everyone who is good to me gets on and those who are horrid come to grief. I've seen it, lots of times." She spoke seriously, with an air of conviction.

"Well, I hope you're right." Jimmy sighed. He had not sold any manuscript for several days, and was feeling distinctly worried about the future. His original capital had dwindled down to a few shillings, despite Lalage's careful management, and, so far, he had not been paid for any of his work. Already, the need of money was crippling him, robbing him of his powers of imagination, and by that hideous perversity of effect which every writer knows to his cost, making him do less instead of the more he longed to produce.

Lalage, ever an optimist, did her best to cheer him up and to assist him, searching the papers for news items which might form the basis of an article, counting the number of words in his manuscripts to see they did not exceed the regulation column length, and even copying out his rough notes in her clear, bold handwriting.

"I wish you could get a typewriter machine, Jimmy," she remarked. "I'm sure your stuff would have a better chance, and I could soon learn to use the thing. Other girls do, so I'm sure I can."

"They cost a lot of money," Jimmy answered, rather wearily.

Lalage tossed her head. "You can get them on the hire-purchase system. I believe you think I should get tired of it, you old silly. Now don't you?"

The man stooped down and kissed her. "I don't think anything of the kind. I know you're a brick, only——." He broke off with a sigh, then, "I'm going down to the club, to see if I can find Kelly. I must do something before we get in a fix."

She looked up at him anxiously. "Will you be long, dear? And do be careful, won't you? You walk through the traffic as if it wasn't there, unless you have me to look after you."

When he had gone out, she sat for a long time, very still, staring into the fire. Already, she was getting a little afraid. Twice, Jimmy had gone down to the club in the vain hope of hearing of something to do or picking up some useful hints, and each time he had returned a little flushed and inclined to be apologetic. Lalage did not blame him, even in her own mind. It was inevitable, she told herself, after all he had been through, to the strain of which was now added the anxiety of the present. She did not blame him, but at the same time, as she glanced round her little home, she gave a shudder of fear at the possibility of losing it all and of losing Jimmy as well. "If I were only sure of him, if I dare trust him, I wouldn't mind, I'd risk it all. But to lose everything, and then be homeless and alone again——" She suddenly felt very cold and stooped down to poke the little fire.

A moment later, the electric bell rang, three times in rapid succession, a signal she knew well. She stood up quickly, her face very pale. "It's Ralph," she muttered. "And we want money so badly. I wonder if he would just lend it." She stood, with clenched hands, trying to decide. The bell rang again, seemingly more insistently; then, deliberately, she sat down, and put her fingers in her ears. "Oh, Jimmy, I won't, because I love you. But I don't believe you trust me, and I don't believe you understand."

Down at the club, Jimmy was seeking advice of Douglas Kelly.

"Hasn't the Record paid you yet?" the latter asked. "Oh, you haven't sent in an account? You should have done so on the Wednesday after your stuff appeared, then you would have got a cheque on the Friday afternoon. Still, if you go down to-day, before five, the cashier will give it to you. He's a very decent fellow, and, if you're ever badly stuck, he'll let you have it the day your article appears. I've been glad enough to get it that way, more than once."

Jimmy felt that sudden relief which only those who have been desperately short of money can know. He had led Lalage to understand that he had a couple of shillings in his pocket for his own needs beyond the half-crown he left her, whereas he had not even got his omnibus fare back from Fleet Street.

"I hate to think of you going out without the money for a drink and so on," she had said. "What's more, I'm not going to let you do it." So he had lied bravely to her, knowing that, unless he had some luck, the half-crown would be needed for food for the morrow. Now, however, he would have money enough for a good many to-morrows.

Kelly knew nothing of Lalage, but he understood what the sudden brightening of Jimmy's face meant.

"Been hard up?" he asked, with a smile. "Why didn't you come to me, as I told you to do? Of course, you'll find it an uphill game, and I would advise you to leave it now, at the start, if I were not sure you would succeed in the end. You'll have a hard fight, because you've got ability and experience of the world, and those will tell against you at first."

"Why?" Jimmy asked.

Kelly gave a cynical little laugh. "Because there's not much demand for either in Fleet Street. You've only got to study the Press to see that—dailies, weeklies, magazines, the whole lot. They want writers who are just on the level of the mob, because then the mob can understand them. All your travel won't help you to get a job; but if you could go into a newspaper office and say, 'I know more about Upper Clapton, or Stockwell, or some such beastly place than any man living,' or 'I'm a crime expert, and I can give the names, and dates of execution, of every man hanged in London for the last twenty years,' then they'd welcome you as a long-lost brother, and give you about ten pounds a week."

Jimmy laughed, not quite believing him. "Then how did you yourself get on?"

Kelly finished his drink, and ordered some more before answering the question, then, "I bluffed," he said. "There was a coal strike coming on, and I swore I was an expert on coal mining, so the Evening Guardian gave me a job. I picked up a little knowledge locally, just a few technical terms and so on; and, as for the rest, neither the editor nor the public knew that half my stuff was utter rot. It read well, and lent itself to good headlines."

"And then, after that?" Jimmy asked.

"After that? Oh, well, I had got my foot in, and it was easy. I advertised myself, and made the ruck get out of my way, as I told you before. I'm not loved, but then I'm not in Fleet Street for the sake of earning the regard of its population."

Jimmy looked surprised. "They all seem pretty eager to talk to you."

"Of course they do." Kelly laughed grimly. "Of course they do, because I'm a power already and I may be an editor by-and-by; but, if I went down, all they would think about would be to scramble for my place. Don't think I'm blaming them; they're a decent enough crowd, awfully decent, but the fight is too hard to have time for thinking about anyone else. Why you, yourself, are already the common foe, in a sense. You're taking up space in the Record which, but for you, someone else would fill. You won't get any help or advice, and most people would say I was a fool for introducing a possible competitor of my own. You'll feel the same, if you stick in Fleet Street long enough, which you won't do."

"I thought you said I was going to succeed," Jimmy retorted.

Kelly yawned. "So I did, my bright child. But when you've learnt the ropes, and can afford it, you'll go in for fiction. But just now, all your ideas are chaotic, and you won't do a decent story until you've sorted them out and fallen in love."

Jimmy coloured. "How do you know I've never done that yet?"

The other man shook his head. "You're too sweetly young in many of your ways and ideas. Oh, I daresay there's some prim maiden belonging to your sister's circle, with an aldermanic papa in the City—but you, yourself, would never really be in love with her. I know you too well; and if you did marry her, you would never write a book, until you had run away from her, as you would certainly do. Well," he got up abruptly, as if to avoid giving any reasons for his ideas, "I'm going over to the Record office now, and if you come, I'll introduce you to the cashier and you can get your cheque."

Jimmy did not waste any time after he left the Record office. The cashier himself changed the cheque for him, the banks being shut. Jimmy hesitated a moment as to whether he should take a hansom, then remembered the lean days of the past, and jumped on an omnibus. Lalage could make a shilling go a surprisingly long way.

He found the girl sitting in the dark, in front of an almost dead fire, and his conscience smote him on account of the time he had spent in the warm, comfortable club smoking-room.

"We're in luck, sweetheart," he said, putting his hands on her shoulders, and kissing her. "I've got the six guineas out of the Record."

She reached up and pulled his face down to hers again, in one of her rare bursts of outward affection. "Oh, I'm so glad. I was reckoning up, and I found you must have gone out without any money, even for tobacco or a drink, and I was picturing you trudging back in this cold drizzle. You are a naughty boy to do those things."

"And how about you, if I spent all the money? Wouldn't you think to yourself that I was a selfish beast?"

Lalage shook her head. "You could never be selfish; it's not your nature. You might be thoughtless, that's all. Promise me you won't go out like that again. I shall worry ever so much if you don't. I know, only too well, what it means to trudge about in the London mud without a penny for even a glass of hot milk. Oh, the cold." She gave a little shiver. "You know that shop in Regent Street, where they have the big fires in the window, showing off some stoves. I've stood there for as long as I dare, more than once, trying to think I was feeling the heat through the glass."

"Don't, please don't," Jimmy muttered thickly. "I do hate to think of it all. And it shan't be so again, I swear it shan't. Let's forget it all to-night, and go out and have some dinner somewhere, for a change. You're all on a shiver now. I'll go out and get some brandy, whilst you put your things on. I may as well bring in a bottle."

Lalage put her hand on his arm. "Not a bottle, dear, only a quartern. That'll be quite enough. Do what Lalage tells you this time."

"Don't I always do what you tell me?" he asked, laughing.

"Oh, I don't want you to say that," she answered quickly. "You ought to be your own master; only when I know a thing is right I do like to tell you. A woman should, I think."

For an instant, Jimmy felt a wild longing to beg her to change the word "woman" to that of "wife," but she had already turned towards the door, and at the same moment the noise of the grimy street seemed to come in through the window and somehow fill the room. The sound recalled him to his normal self. How could he, a Grierson, take a wife from those surroundings?



CHAPTER XVI

Mrs. Marlow had learnt of her brother's sudden change of address with mingled annoyance and anxiety. It was not pleasant to have him quit the lodgings she had found for him after so short a trial, and she could not help feeling that there was some very strong attraction drawing him to town. Mrs. Benn, that uncompromising "Son of Temperance," had come over herself to explain matters to Jimmy's sister, and had taken the opportunity to enlarge on the number of bottles she had found in her lodger's room, omitting to state, however, that these had included the best part of a dozen of Bass, which, possibly because she hated liquor so much, she had promptly sold to her next-door neighbour at a halfpenny a bottle below the retail price.

"I'm afraid as how the house was too quiet for Mr. Grierson, mum," she wound up. "Having nothing to do hisself, except just write, he seemed to think other folks couldn't be tired and want to go to bed, folks that worked." She emphasised her words with a truly British scorn for those who live by their brains. "I'm sure the hours and hours as I've sat up for him, it's fair worn me out. And him your brother, mum, and uncle to these lovely little children, what I remember coming into the world."

Mrs. Marlow wrote plainly to her brother, doing her duty without flinching. Jimmy read the letter with a grim smile, then handed it to Lalage, who was bubbling over with wrath long before she reached the end of it.

"They are horrid, Jimmy, really they are. They see something wrong in everything you do. It's quite enough to drive you to the bad, never giving you a chance, and treating you like a silly little boy. I'm sure you don't drink as she says you do. She must be a nasty-minded woman. You know I should be the last to want to separate you from your family, or anything like that, if they were good to you; but as it is, I'm sure you're much better here than in those miserable lodgings, all alone and moping. That would make you drink."

They were having breakfast at the time, but Lalage looked so sweet, lying back in a big wicker chair, wrapped in an old kimono of Jimmy's, that he felt compelled to lean over and kiss her.

"You won't let me go to drink, will you, Lalage?" he asked.

"Of course not," she answered promptly. "You know how I feel about that. Yet your people would never believe it if they found me—when they find me. We girls," she looked up, a little defiantly, "we girls are supposed to be everything that is bad; whilst they, your City people, have got all the virtues, except charity, which they don't imagine they need."

Jimmy coloured. "You're a bit rough on them sometimes, Lalage," he said.

She shook her head emphatically. "I'm not too rough. Have they any idea of charity, any idea of forgiveness? If I were able to live respectably again, live a good life, would they, or any of their kind, allow me to wipe out the past and start afresh?"

Jimmy suddenly became busy with a cigarette he was rolling. "You are living a respectable life now," he muttered, weakly evading the question.

But Lalage smiled bitterly, and then, with a sudden change of expression, she laid her hand on his, very gently. "No, Jimmy dear, let's be straight, even amongst ourselves. You are all right, because you're a man, and men are allowed to do these things; but they would all treat me as a bad woman, as something rather worse than a dog. Even you, dear, don't respect me, in your heart, although I have tried to make you."

The man got up suddenly, tossing his newly made cigarette into the grate. "I do respect you, you know I do. To me, you come before everyone else in the world; and I think as much of you, as if, as if——" He stammered a little, and, still very gently, she finished the sentence for him.

"As if I were your wife."

Jimmy's eyes flashed. Somehow, it sounded wonderfully sweet, coming from her lips, and all his caution, all his Grierson traditions, seemed to slip from him suddenly. He stood up, very straight, facing her.