er hands. She never hesitated to
ask for money, and Jack responded without a word. Her account grew by
leaps and bounds. The cashier began to ask whether she wanted to see the
manager when she called at the bank. She could see, some way off but
clearly, the beacons on the coast of hope.

All through Jack's moods she had suffered from the defection of Betty.
On her return from Broadstairs she had written to her to come to Elm
Tree Place, but had received no answer. This happened again in
September; and fear took hold of her, for Betty had, ivy-like, twined
herself very closely round Victoria's heart of oak. She went to
Finsbury; but Betty had gone, leaving no address. She went to the P.R.R.
also. The place had become ghostly, for the familiar faces had gone. The
manageress was nowhere to be seen; nor was Nelly, probably by now a
manageress herself. Betty was not there, and the girl who wonderingly
served the beautiful lady with a tea-cake said that no girl of that name
was employed at the depot. Then Victoria saw herself sitting in the
churchyard of her past, between the two dear ghosts of Farwell and
Betty. The customers had changed, or their faces had receded so that she
knew them no more: they still played matador and fives and threes, chess
too. Alone the chains remained which the ghosts had rattled. Silently
she went away, turning over that leaf of her life for ever. Farwell was
dead, and Betty gone--married probably--and in Shepherd's Bush, not
daring to allow Victoria's foot to sully the threshold of 'First Words
of Love.'

Her conviction that Betty was false had a kind of tonic effect upon her.
She was alone and herself again; she realised that the lonely being is
the strong being. Now, at last, she could include the last woman she had
known in the category of those who threw stories. And her determination
to be free grew apace.

She invented a reason every day to extract money from Holt. He, blindly
desirous, careless of money, acceded to every fresh demand. Now it was a
faked bill from Barbezan Soeurs for two hundred pounds, now the rent in
arrear, a blue rates notice, an offhand request for a fiver to pay the
servants, the vet's bill or the price of a cab. Holt drew and overdrew.
If a suspicion ever entered his mind that he was being exploited, he
dismissed it at once, telling himself that Victoria was rather
extravagant. For a time letters from Rawsley synchronised with her fresh
demands, but repetition ha