er it's over the sounder I shall sleep!" she declared to
Garnett; and all the mitigations of art could not conceal the fact that
she was desperately in need of that restorative. There were moments,
indeed, when he was sorrier for her than for her husband or her
daughter; so black and unfathomable appeared the abyss into which she
must slip back if she lost her hold on this last spar of safety.

But she did not lose her hold; his own experience, as well as her
husband's declaration, might have told him that she always got what she
wanted. How much she had wanted this particular thing was shown by the
way in which, on the last day, when all peril was over, she bloomed out
in renovated splendour. It gave Garnett a shivering sense of the
ugliness of the alternative which had confronted her.

The day came; the showy coupe provided by Mrs. Newell presented itself
punctually at Garnett's door, and the young man entered it and drove to
the rue Panonceaus. It was a little melancholy back street, with lean
old houses sweating rust and damp, and glimpses of pit-life gardens,
black and sunless, between walls bristling with iron spikes. On the
narrow pavement a blind man pottered along led by a red-eyed poodle: a
little farther on a dishevelled woman sat grinding coffee on the
threshold of a _buvette_. The bridal carriage stopped before one of the
doorways, with a clatter of hoofs and harness which drew the
neighbourhood to its windows, and Garnett started to mount the
ill-smelling stairs to the fourth floor, on which he learned from the
_concierge_ that Mr. Newell lodged. But half-way up he met the latter
descending, and they turned and went down together.

Hermione's parent wore his usual imperturbable look, and his eye seemed
as full as ever of generalisations on human folly; but there was
something oddly shrunken and submerged in his appearance, as though he
had grown smaller or his clothes larger. And on the last hypothesis
Garnett paused--for it became evident to him that Mr. Newell had hired
his dress-suit.

Seated at the young man's side on the satin cushions, he remained
silent while the carriage rolled smoothly and rapidly through the
net-work of streets leading to the Boulevard Saint-Germain; only once
he remarked, glancing at the elaborate fittings of the coupe: "Is this
Mrs. Newell's carriage?"

"I believe so--yes," Garnett assented, with the guilty sense that in
defining that lady's possessions it was impossible n