yet must perish of drought. He could only imagine one greater misery, one
more excruciating torture, one more exquisite unhappiness than this
happiness she had conferred upon him--and that was to be without her.

He drew a deep breath, and drove back his fierce, snarling misery, and
kicked it into its kennel, and befriended the absurd little couple. W.
Keyse was tested, proved capable of manipulating the steering-wheel, duly
certificated, and engaged. There were a couple of living-rooms over the
coach-house that was now a garage. Saxham sent in some plain furniture,
and behold an Eden! Pots of ferns purchased from a street hawker showed
greenly behind the tidiest muslin blinds you ever sor! and Mrs. William
Keyse, expectant mother of a potential Briton, sat behind them, and as she
patched the shirts that had been taken out of pawn--and whether they're
let out on hire to parties wanting such things or whether the mice eat
'oles in 'em, who can say? but the styte in which they come back from Them
Plyces is something chronic!--she sang, sometimes "Come, Buy My Coloured
'Erring," which they learned you along of the Tonic Sofa at the Board
School in Kentish Town; and sometimes "The Land Where Dreams Come True!"

This was a fulfilled dream, this little, cheap home of two rooms--one of
them opening upon nothing by a loft-door--over a garage that had been a
coach-house, at the end of the paved yard looking towards the rear of the
tall, drab-stuccoed house whose high double plate-glass windows were
shielded from plebeian eyes by softly-quilled screens of silk muslin
running on polished brass rods. But when the electric lights were switched
on, before the inner blinds were drawn down, you could see quite plain
into the consulting-room, a little below your level, where the Doctor sat
at his big writing-table that was heaped with notebooks and papers and had
a telephone on it, and all sorts of mysterious instruments in shining
brass and silver, as brightly polished as the gleaming thing with a lid,
shaped like a violin-case and with a spirit-lamp underneath it, in which
all sorts of wicked-looking knives and forceps were boiled when they were
taken out of the black bag; or into Mrs. Saxham's bedroom, that was on the
floor above, and was done up in the loveliest style you ever! "Not that
Missis W. Keyse would exchange 'er present quarters for Buckin'am Palace,"
she declared, pouring out her William's tea, "if invited to do so by 'er