o. 'Angin' about! I'd like
to know----"

"I didn't say anythink about your 'angin' about. Yer catch a feller up
so quickly, Bertha. What I mean to say----"

"Oh! yer and yer meanin's. Don't know what yer _do_ mean, if the truth
were known. 'Ere's a pleasant way of spendin' an evenin'----"

Breton regarded them with curiosity. Were they real? Did they feel the
strange oppression of this lowering sky as strongly as he did? Were they
uncertain as to whether these buildings were alive or no? Perhaps they
could tell him whether those omnibuses that came lumbering so heavily up
Regent Street were safe and secure.

Oddly enough, although he tried, he could not remember exactly what it
was that Christopher had told him. Something, of course, to do with his
grandmother. Everything was to do with her.... She was the one who was
driving him to destruction. Always she was stepping forward, sending him
down when he was climbing up, at last, to safety, always it was she who
stood behind him, on the watch lest some happiness or success should
come his way.

He felt as though he would like to go and force his way into 104
Portland Place and face the woman and tell her what she had done to him.
Yes, that would be a fine thing--to see all those Beaminster relations
gathering round, protesting, frightened.

And then it occurred to him that he really did not know the way to
Portland Place. Things were so strange to-night. He knew that it was
close at hand, but he was afraid that he would never find it. He was
really afraid that he would never find it.

Some man jostled into him, apologized and moved away. The contact
cleared his brain, asserted the reality of the buildings, the crowds,
the cabs and carriages. He pulled himself together and began slowly to
walk down Oxford Street in the direction of Tottenham Court Road.

He remembered very clearly and distinctly what it was that Christopher
had told him. Rachel was in danger because her husband had heard of her
friendship with him, Breton....

It would not have been Francis Breton if he had not taken this piece of
news and looked at it in its most sensational colours. He had, through
all these last weeks, been striving to accustom himself to the agony of
enduring life without her. He dimly perceived that it was the emptiness
of life rather than any actual loss of any particular person that was so
terrible to him. He had still, very fine and beautiful, his memory of
the day when