uel, for the softness of the big dark eyes.

"She'd show a better feeling," she said, "to keep a quiet tongue. Sit
still, Stanley!"

Once more the little boy stopped drumming his heels, and shifted his
stare from the old butler back to her who spoke. The cab, which had
seemed to hesitate and start, as though jibbing at something in the road,
resumed its ambling pace. Creed looked through the well-closed window.
There before him, so long that it seemed to have no end, like a building
in a nightmare, stretched that place where he did not mean to end his
days. He faced towards the horse again. The colour had deepened in his
nose. He spoke:

"If they'd a-give me my last edition earlier, 'stead of sending of it
down after that low-class feller's taken all my customers, that'd make a
difference to me o' two shillin's at the utmost in the week, and all
clear savin's." To these words, dark with hidden meaning, he received no
answer save the drumming of the small boy's heels; and, reverting to the
subject he had been distracted from, he murmured: "She was a-wearin' of
new clothes."

He was startled by the fierce tone of a voice he hardly knew. "I don't
want to hear about her; she's not for decent folk to talk of."

The old butler looked round askance. The seamstress was trembling
violently. Her fierceness at such a moment shocked him. "'Dust to
dust,'" he thought.

"Don't you be considerate of it," he said at last, summoning all his
knowledge of the world; "she'll come to her own place." And at the sight
of a slow tear trickling over her burning cheek, he added hurriedly:
"Think of your baby--I'll see yer through. Sit still, little boy--sit
still! Ye're disturbin' of your mother."

Once more the little boy stayed the drumming of his heels to look at him
who spoke; and the closed cab rolled on with its slow, jingling sound.

In the third four-wheeled cab, where the windows again were wide open,
Martin Stone, with his hands thrust deep into the pockets of his coat,
and his long legs crossed, sat staring at the roof, with a sort of
twisted scorn on his pale face.

Just inside the gate, through which had passed in their time so many dead
and living shadows, Hilary stood waiting. He could probably not have
explained why he had come to see this tiny shade committed to the
earth--in memory, perhaps, of those two minutes when the baby's eyes had
held parley with his own, or in the wish to pay a mute respect to he