in alarm.

"I won't go in," Tommy persisted in a quiet satiric tone. "I'll leave my
door open below, and see you when you come down."

She could be heard descending.

"Why, I guess they're here," said a voice, Nick's, within, and the door was
pulled wide open.

"My legs are all of a tremble!" muttered Miss Ingate.

Nick's studio seemed larger than reality because of its inadequate
illumination. On a small paint-stained table in the centre was an oil-lamp
beneath a round shade that had been decorated by some artist's hand with a
series of reclining women in many colours. This lamp made a moon in the
midnight of the studio, but it was a moon almost without rays; the shade
seemed to imprison the light, save that which escaped from its superior
orifice. Against the table stood a tall thin woman in black. Her face was
lit by the rays escaping upward; a pale, firm, bland face, with rather
prominent cheeks, loose grey hair above, surmounted by a toque. The dress
was dark, and the only noticeable feature of it was that the sleeves were
finished in white linen; from these the hands emerged calm and veined under
the lampshade; in one of them a pair of gloves were clasped. On the table
lay a thin mantle.

At the back of the studio there sat another woman, so engloomed that no
detail of her could be distinguished.

"As I was saying," the tall upright woman resumed as soon as Miss Ingate
and Audrey had been introduced. "Betty Burke is in prison. She got six
weeks this morning. She may never come out again. Almost her last words
from the dock were that you, Miss Nickall, should be asked to go to London
to look after Mrs. Burke, and perhaps to take Betty's place in other ways.
She said that her mother preferred you to anybody else, and that she was
sure you would come. Shall you?"

The accents were very clear, the face was delicately smiling, the little
gestures had a quite tranquil quality. Rosamund did not seem to care
whether Miss Nickall obeyed the summons or not. She did not seem to care
about anything whatever except her own manner of existing. She was the
centre of Paris, and Paris was naught but a circumference for her. All
phenomena beyond the individuality of the woman were reduced to the
irrelevant and the negligible. It would have been absurd to mention to her
costume balls. The frost of her indifference would have wilted them into
nothingness.

"Yes, of course, I shall go," Nick answered.

"When?" was the imp