d she pressed a hand over her labouring
heart. "Get her then; out Fourth Street, Camden; the Reverend Mr.
Needles. But afterwards don't come complaining to me. You ought to have
seen to her; you've got the money, the influence. And you have done
nothing, beyond some stinking dollars ... wouldn't even name her. Eunice
Scofield, a child without--"

All that she had said was absolutely true, just.

"I suppose you'll even think I didn't give her the sums you sent; that
damned Needles has been bleeding me, suspects something." She stopped
from a lack of breath; her darkened face was purplish, in the shadows.
"I haven't been well, either--a fierce pain here, in my heart."

It was the brandy, he told her; she should leave the city, late wine
parties, go back into the country. "Go back," she echoed bitterly.
"Where? How?" He winced--the past reaching inexorably into the future.
Jasper Penny made no attempt to ignore, forget, his responsibility; he
admitted it to her; but at the same time the tyrannical hunger increased
within him--the mingled desire for fresh paths and the nostalgia of the
old freedom of spirit. But life, that had made him, had in the same
degree created Essie; neither had been the result of the other; they had
been swept together, descended blindly in company, submerged in the
passion that he had thought must last forever, but which had burned to
ashes, to nothing more than a vague sense of putrefaction in life.

"Thank you," he said formally, putting away the note book. "Something,
of course, must be done; but what, I can only say after I have seen
Eunice. I am, undoubtedly, more to blame than yourself."

"I suppose, in this holy strain, you'll end by giving her all and me
nothing."

"... what you are getting as long as you live?"

"That's little enough, when I hear how much you have, what all that iron
is bringing you. Why, you could let me have twenty, thirty thousand, and
never know it."

"If you are unable to get on, that too will be rectified."

"You are really not a bad old thing, Jasper," she pronounced, mollified.
"At one time--do you remember?--you said if ever the chance came you
would marry me. Ah, you needn't fear, I wouldn't have you with all your
iron, gold. I--" she stopped abruptly, uneasily. "Not a bad old thing,"
she repeated, moving to secure a half-full glass.

"Why do you call me old?" he asked curiously.

"I hadn't thought of it before," she admitted; "but, this evening, you