osition of an applicant, distressed her. She grieved for him. She saw
all his good qualities--his energy, vitality, cleverness, facile
kindliness, his large masculinity. It seemed to her, as she gazed up at
him from the music-stool in the shaded solitude or the drawing-room,
that she was very intimate with him, and very dependent on him; and she
wished him to be always flamboyant, imposing, and successful.

'If you are at all hard up, Jack----' She made as if to reject the note.

'Oh! get out!' he laughed. 'It's not a tenner that I'm short of. I tell
you what you _can_ do,' he went on quickly and lightly. 'I was thinking
of raising a bit temporarily on this house. Five hundred, say. You
wouldn't mind, would you?'

The house was her own property, inherited from an aunt. John's
suggestion came as a shock to her. To mortgage her house: this was what
he wanted!

'Oh yes, certainly, if you like,' she acquiesced quietly. 'But I
thought--I thought business was so good just now, and----'

'So it is,' he stopped her with a hint of annoyance. 'I'm short of
capital. Always have been.'

'I see,' she said, not seeing. 'Well, do what you like.'

'Right, my girl. Now--roost!' He extinguished the gas over the
mantelpiece.

The familiar vulgarity of some of his phrases always vexed her, and
'roost' was one of these phrases. In a flash he fell from a creature
engagingly masculine to the use-worn daily sharer of her monotonous
existence.

'Have you heard about Arthur Twemlow coming over?' she demanded, half
vindictively, as he was preparing to blow out the last candle on the
piano. He stopped.

'Who's Arthur Twemlow?'

'Mr. Twemlow's son, of course,' she said. 'From America.'

'Oh! Him! Coming over, did you say? I wonder what he looks like. Who
told you?'

'Uncle Meshach. And he said I was to say you were to look out for
yourself when Arthur Twemlow came. I don't know what he meant. One of
his jokes, I expect.' She tried to laugh.

John looked at her, and then looked away, and immediately blew out the
last candle. But she had seen him turn pale at what Uncle Meshach had
said. Or was that pallor merely the effect on his face of raising the
coloured candle-shade as he extinguished the candle? She could not be
sure.

'Uncle Meshach ought to be in the lunatic asylum, I think,' John's voice
came majestically out of the gloom as they groped towards the door.

'We shall have to be polite to Arthur Twemlow, when he comes, if