n't you?'

'May I? It's so good of you. I'm not going South for a couple of
months.'

'Yes, you can always telephone. You'll find me there under Mrs Ferris.'

Holt looked at her once more.

'I don't want you to think I'm prying. But, you wrote me saying I was to
ask for Mrs Ferris. I did, of course, but, you . . . you're not. . . .?'

'Married? No, Jack. Don't ask me anything else. You shall know
everything soon.'

She got up and stood for a moment beside his chair. His eyes were fixed
on her hands.

'There,' she said, 'come along and let me shew you the house, and my
pictures, and my pack of hounds.'

He followed her obediently, giving its meed of praise to all her
possessions. He did not care for animals; he lacked the generation of
culture which leads from cement-making to a taste for dogs. The French
engravings on the stairs surprised him a little. He had a strain of
puritanism in him running straight from Bethlehem, which even the
reading of Swinburne and Baudelaire had not quite eradicated. A vague
sense of the fitness of things made him think that somehow these were
not the pictures a lady should hang; she might keep them in a portfolio.
Otherwise, there were the servants. . . .

'And what do you think of my bedroom?' asked Victoria opening the door
suddenly.

Holt stood nervously on the threshold. He took in its details one by
one, the blue paper, the polished mahogany, the flowered chintzes, the
long glass, the lace curtains; it all looked so comfortable, so
luxurious as to eclipse easily the rigidly good but ugly things he had
been used to from birth onwards. He looked at the dressing table too,
covered with its many bottles and brushes; then he started slightly and
again a hot flush rose over his cheeks. With an effort he detached his
eyes from the horrid thing he saw.

'Very pretty, very pretty,' he gasped. Without waiting for Victoria he
turned and went downstairs.

Within the next week they met again. Jack took no notice of her for four
days, and then suddenly telephoned asking her to dine and to come to the
theatre. She was still in bed and she felt low-spirited, full of fear
that her trump would not make. She accepted with an alacrity that she
regretted a minute later, but she was drowning and could not dally with
the lifebelt. Her preparation for the dinner was as elaborate as that
which had heralded her capture of Cairns, far more elaborate than any
she made for the Vesuvius where insol