ffed
penetratingly, she avoided my eye as she talked and interrupted
everything I had to say; she kept stabbing fiercely at the cushions of
her sofa with a long hat-pin and pretending she was overwhelmed with
grief at the DEBACLE she was deliberately organising.

"Then part," she cried, "part. If you don't want a smashing up,--part!
You two have got to be parted. You've got never to see each other ever,
never to speak." There was a zest in her voice. "We're not circulating
stories," she denied. "No! And Curmain never told us anything--Curmain
is an EXCELLENT young man; oh! a quite excellent young man. You
misjudged him altogether."...

I was equally unsuccessful with Bailey. I caught the little wretch in
the League Club, and he wriggled and lied. He wouldn't say where he had
got his facts, he wouldn't admit he had told any one. When I gave him
the names of two men who had come to me astonished and incredulous,
he attempted absurdly to make me think they had told HIM. He did his
horrible little best to suggest that honest old Quackett, who had just
left England for the Cape, was the real scandalmonger. That struck me
as mean, even for Bailey. I've still the odd vivid impression of his
fluting voice, excusing the inexcusable, his big, shifty face evading
me, his perspiration-beaded forehead, the shrugging shoulders, and the
would-be exculpatory gestures--Houndsditch gestures--of his enormous
ugly hands.

"I can assure you, my dear fellow," he said; "I can assure you we've
done everything to shield you--everything."...

3

Isabel came after dinner one evening and talked in the office. She made
a white-robed, dusky figure against the deep blues of my big window. I
sat at my desk and tore a quill pen to pieces as I talked.

"The Baileys don't intend to let this drop," I said. "They mean that
every one in London is to know about it."

"I know."

"Well!" I said.

"Dear heart," said Isabel, facing it, "it's no good waiting for things
to overtake us; we're at the parting of the ways."

"What are we to do?"

"They won't let us go on."

"Damn them!"

"They are ORGANISING scandal."

"It's no good waiting for things to overtake us," I echoed; "they have
overtaken us." I turned on her. "What do you want to do?"

"Everything," she said. "Keep you and have our work. Aren't we Mates?"

"We can't."

"And we can't!"

"I've got to tell Margaret," I said.

"Margaret!"

"I can't bear the idea of any one els