exquisite and so alarming as that moment.

He was now alone on the ground floor. He caught no sound from above.

"Well, I'd better get out of this," he said to himself. "Anyhow, I'm
all right!... What a girl! Terrific!" And, lighting a fresh cigarette,
he left the house.

V

"And now what's amiss?" Thomas Batchgrew demanded, alone with Mrs.
Maldon in the tranquillity of the bedroom.

Mrs. Maldon lay once more in bed; the bedclothes covered her without
a crease, and from the neat fold-back of the white sheet her wrinkled
ivory face and curving black hair emerged so still and calm that her
recent flight to the stairs seemed unreal, impossible. The impression
her mien gave was that she never had moved and never would move from
the bed. Thomas Batchgrew's blusterous voice frankly showed acute
irritation. He was angry because nine hundred and sixty-five pounds
had monstrously vanished, because the chance of a good investment was
lost, because Mrs. Maldon tied his hands, because Rachel had forgotten
her respect and his dignity in addressing him; but more because he
felt too old to impose himself by sheer rough-riding, individual
force on the other actors in the drama, and still more because he, and
nobody else, had left the nine hundred and sixty-five pounds in the
house. What an orgy of denunciation he would have plunged into had
some other person insisted on leaving the money in the house with a
similar result!

Mrs. Maldon looked up at him with a glance of compassion. She was
filled with pity for him because he had arrived at old age without
dignity and without any sense of what was fine in life; he was not
even susceptible to the chastening influences of a sick-room. She
knew, indeed, that he hated and despised sickness in others, and
that when ill himself he became a moaning mass of cowardice and
vituperation. And in her heart she invented the most wonderful excuses
for him, and transformed him into a martyr of destiny who had suffered
both through ancestry and through environment. Was it his fault that
he was thus tragically defective? So that by the magic power of her
benevolence he became dignified in spite of himself.

She said--

"Mr. Batchgrew, I want you to oblige me by not discussing my affairs
with any one but me."

At that moment the front door closed firmly below, and the bedroom
vibrated.

"Is that Louis going?" she asked.

Batchgrew went to the window and looked downward, lowering the pu