the eyes that meet hers, less poignant than the shame and indignation
that drive the blood from those ivory cheeks.

"He married me on the strict QT at the Registrar's at Cookham," goes on
Lessie, her painted mouth twisting, "a fortnight before he was ordered out
on the Staff. We'd been friends for over a year. There was a child coming,
since we're by way of being plain-spoken," says Lessie, picking up the
prostrate red umbrella and the jewelled card-case, possibly to conceal a
blush; "and he swore he'd never look at another woman, and write by every
mail. And so he did at first, and I used to cry over the blooming piffle
he put into his letters, and wish I'd been a straighter woman, for his
sake. And then the Siege began, and the letters stopped coming, and I
cried enough to spoil my voice, little thinking how my husband was playing
the giddy bachelor thousands of miles away. And then came the news of the
Relief, and despatches, saying that he"--her pretty face is distorted by
the wry grimace of genuine anguish--"_he_ was killed! And a month later I
got a copy of a rotten Siege newspaper, sent me by I don't know who, and
never shall, with a flowery paragraph in it, announcing his lordship's
engagement to Miss Something Mildare. Oh! it was merry hell to know how
he'd done me--me that worshipped the very ground he trod!... Me that had
made a Judy of myself in crape and weepers--widow's weepers for the man
that wished me dead!"

Her voice is thick with rage. Her face is convulsed. Her eyes are burning
coals. She has never been so nearly a great actress, this meretricious
little dancer and comedian, as in this moment when she forgets her art.

"Picture it, you!... Don't you fancy me in 'em? Don't you see me in my
bedroom tearing 'em off?" She rends her flimsy cobweb of a handkerchief
into tatters and spurns them from her. "So!... so!... that's what I did
to 'em!" She snarls with a sudden access of tigerishness. "And if that
white face of yours had been within reach of my ten fingers, I'd have
ragged it into ribbons like the blooming fallals. Don't dare tell me you'd
not have done the same! Perhaps, though, you wouldn't. You're a lady, born
and bred," owns Lessie grudgingly, "and I was a jobbing tailor's kid, that
worked to keep myself and other folks as a baby imp in Pantomime, while
you were being coddled up and kept in cotton-wool!"

She ends with a husky laugh and a shrug of the shoulders. The swollen face
with the we