me be!"

She broke off hastily, clasping her hands across her breast.

The story, though incoherent, was possible; Rainham could see no
motive for her deceiving him, and yet he believed she was lying. He
merely shrugged his shoulders, with a rising lassitude. He seemed to
have been infected by her own dreariness, to labour under a
disability of doing or saying any more; he, too, gave it up. He
wanted to get away out of the dingy room; its rickety table and
chairs, its two vulgar vases on the stained mantel, its gross
upholstery, seemed too trenchantly sordid in the strong August sun.
The child's golden head--she was growing intelligent now, and strong
on her legs--was the one bright spot in the room. He stopped to pat
it with a great pity, a sense of too much pathos in things flooding
him, before he passed out again into the mean street.

CHAPTER XIII

September set in cold, with rain and east winds, and Rainham, a
naturally chilly mortal, as he handed his coat to Lady Garnett's
butler, and followed him into the little library, where dinner was
laid for three, congratulated himself that a seasonable fire
crackled on the large hearth.

"I hardly expected you back yet," he remarked, after the first
greetings, stretching out his hands to the blaze; "and your note was
a welcome surprise. I almost think we are the only people in town."

Lady Garnett shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of rich
tolerance, as one who acknowledged the respectability of all tastes,
whilst preferring her own.

"London has its charm, to me," she remarked. "We are glad to be
back. I am getting too old to travel--that terrible crossing, and
the terrible people one meets!"

Rainham smiled with absent sympathy, looking into the red coals.

"You must remember, I don't know where you have been. Tell me your
adventures and your news."

"I leave that to Mary, my dear," said the old lady.

And at that moment the girl came in, looking stately and older than
her age in one of the dark, high-cut dresses which she affected. She
shook hands with Rainham, smiling; and as they went to table he
repeated his question.

"It is difficult," she said; "we seem to have been everywhere. Oh,
we have been very restless this year, Philip. I think we were
generally in the train. We tried Trouville----"

"Detestable!" put in Lady Garnett with genial petulance; "it was too
small. Half the world was crowded into it; and it was precisely the
half-world--