tial matter. She jerked with a dirty thumb in the direction of
the kitchen.

"In there. Cooking the dinner," she whispered back. She was untidy,
there were streaks of black on her face, but her eyes looked up at
Maggie with a friendly, roguish glance, as though they had already
something in common. Maggie saw that she had no time to lose. She came
close to her.

"Jane," she said, "I'm in trouble. It's only you who can help me.
Here's a letter that I want posted--just in the ordinary way. Can you
do that for me?"

Jane, suddenly smiling, nodded her head.

"And there's something else," Maggie went on. "To-morrow morning,
before you come here, I want you to go to the Strand post-office--you
know the one opposite the station--and ask for a letter addressed to
me. I've written on a piece of paper here that you're to be given any
letters of mine. Give it to me somehow when no one's looking. Do you
understand?"

Jane nodded her head. Maggie gave her the note and also half-a-crown,
but Jane pushed back the money.

"I don't want no money," she said in a hoarse whisper. "You're the only
one here decent to me."

At that moment the kitchen door opened and Martha appeared. When she
saw Jane she came up to her and said: "Now then, idling again! What
about the potatoes?"

She looked at Maggie with her usual surly suspicion.

"I came down for a candle," Maggie said, "for my room. Will you give me
one, please?"

Jane had vanished.

Martin, meanwhile, after Maggie left him, had returned home in no happy
state. There had leapt upon him again that mood of sullen impatient
rebellion that he knew so well--a mood that really was like a
possession, so that, struggle as he--might, he seemed always in the
grip of some iron-fingered menacing figure.

It was possession in a sense that to many normal, happy people in this
world is so utterly unknown that they can only scornfully name it
weakness and so pass on their way. But those human beings who have
suffered from it do in very truth feel as though they had been caught
up into another world, a world of slavery, moral galley-driving with a
master high above them, driving them with a lash that their chained
limbs may not resist. Such men, if they try to explain that torment,
can often point to the very day and even hour of their sudden slavery;
at such a tick of the clock the clouds gather, the very houses and
street are weighted with a cold malignity, thoughts, desires, impulses