her thin hands caressingly about his arm, asking:

"Why do you look so queer, dear? Is anything wrong?--excuse me asking--or
is it the Funeral has given you the blue hump? It did me! I've not felt
so bad since mother----" She broke off. Then as a shrill peal of laughter
from one of her female companions followed a comment made by the
other--"One of those ..."--she jerked her chin contemptuously, tossing an
unprintable epithet in the direction of her lady friends--"says you're
ugly. I don't think so. I like your face!" Her own was cruelly, terribly
young, even under the white cream of zinc, the rouge, and the rice-powder.
"Were you looking for a friend, dear?" she asked tightening the clasp of
her thin, feverish hands.

"Yes," said Saxham, with a curious smile that made no illumination in his
sombre face. "For Death! There is no better friend than Death, my child,
either for you or me!"

Gently he unloosed the burning hands that clutched him, and turned and
pushed his way out through the noisy, raving, chaffering,
patchouli-scented crowd, and was gone, swallowed up in the roaring torrent
of humanity that foamed down Piccadilly, leaving her frozen and stricken
and staring.

LXII

Months went by. The slight overtures Lynette had made towards a more
familiar friendship had ceased since that rebuff of Saxham's. She had
never since set foot in his third-floor bedroom, where Little Miss Muffet
and Georgy Porgy and the whole regiment of nursery-rhyme characters,
attired in the brilliant aniline hues adored of inartistic,
frankly-barbaric babyhood, adorned the top of the brown-paper dado, and
flourished on the fireplace-tiles.

Only a few weeks more, he said to himself, and he would set her free.
Before the natural craving for love, and life, and happiness should brim
the cup of her fair sweet womanhood to overflowing; before her sex should
rise in desperate revolt against himself her gaoler, Death should unlock
her prison-doors and strike the fetters from those slender wrists, and
point to Hope beckoning her to cross the threshold of a new life.

Soon, very soon now. The two-ounce vial that held the swift dismissing
pang was in the locked drawer of the writing-table beside the
whisky-flask. When he was alone and undisturbed--for Lynette seldom came
to his consulting-room now--Saxham would take it out and dandle it, and
hold it in his hands.

He would put the vial back presently, and lock the drawer, and, it be