floor.

'My fault entirely,' said Twemlow's voice. 'By the way, I guess I can
see you at your office one day soon?'

'Yes, certainly,' John answered with false glib lightness. 'What about?
Some business?'

'Well, yes--business,' drawled Twemlow.

They walked away towards the outer hall, and she heard no more, except
the indistinct murmur of a sudden brief dialogue between the visitor and
the two girls, who must have come in from the garden. Then the front
door banged heavily. He was gone. The vast and arid tedium of her life
closed in upon her again; she seemed to exist in a colourless void
peopled only by ominous dim elusive shapes of disaster.

But as involuntarily she clenched her hands the formidable thought
swept through her brain that Arthur Twemlow was not so calm, nor so
impassive, nor so set apart, but that her spell over him, if she chose
to exert it, might be a shield to the devious man her husband.

CHAPTER IV

AN INTIMACY

'Does father really mean it about me going to the works to-morrow?'
Ethel asked that night.

'I suppose so, my dear,' replied Leonora, and she added: 'You must do
all you can to help him.'

Ethel's clear gift of interpreting even the most delicate modulations in
her mother's voice, instantly gave her the first faint sense of alarm.

'Why, mamma! what do you mean?'

'What I say, dear,' Leonora murmured with neutral calm. 'You must do all
you can to help him. We look on you as a woman now.'

'You don't, you don't!' Ethel thought passionately as she went upstairs.
'And you never will. Never!'

The profound instinctive sympathy which existed between her mother and
herself was continually being disturbed by the manifest insincerity of
that assertion contained in Leonora's last sentence. The girl was in
arms, without knowing it, against a whole order of things. She could
scarcely speak to Millicent in the bedroom. She was disgusted with her
father, and she was disgusted with Leonora for pretending that her
father was sagacious and benevolent, for not admitting that he was
merely a trial to be endured. She was disgusted with Fred Ryley because
he was not as other young men were--Harry Burgess for instance. The
startling hint from Leonora that perhaps all was not well at the works
exasperated her. She held the works in abhorrence. With her sisters, she
had always regarded the works as a vague something which John Stanway
went to and came away from, as the mysterious sour