ut having to suggest to Miss Carew to retire
gracefully. She had that morning heard that Sir Edmund Grosse was in
London, but she had no reason, she told herself, to suppose that he knew
where she was.

Meanwhile, she was exceedingly angry at finding that Adela Delaport
Green was giving her version of her relations with Molly in the season
to all her particular friends. Molly could not find out details, but she
more than suspected that the fact of her being Madame Danterre's
daughter made up part of Adela's story, although she could not imagine
how she came to know who her mother was.

Molly would probably have brooded to a morbid degree over these angry
suspicions, but that another side of life was soon pressed upon her, a
new source of human interest, in the dying husband of a charwoman.

This woman, Mrs. Moloney, had cleaned out the flat before Molly and Miss
Carew took possession.

High up in a small room in a block of workmen's buildings in West
Kensington, Pat Moloney lay dying. He and his wife had been thriftless
and uncertain, they drifted into marriage, drifted in and out of work,
and, having watched their children grow up with some affection and a
good deal of neglect, had now seen them drift away, some back to the old
country, and some to the Colonies.

Mrs. Moloney counted on her fingers to remember their number and their
ages, and spoke with almost more realisation of the personalities of
three little beings that had died in infancy than of the living men and
women and their children.

Moloney was far too ill by the time Molly Dexter came to see him to
speak of anything distinctly. Three years ago he had fallen from a
ladder and had refused to go into the hospital, in which decision he had
been supported by his wife, who "didn't hold" with those institutions. A
kindly, rough, clever young doctor had since treated him for growing
pain and discomfort, and had prophesied evil from the first. Pat kept
about and, when genuinely too ill for regular work, took odd jobs and
drifted more and more into public houses. He had never been a thorough
drunkard, and had been free from other vices, though lazy and
self-indulgent. But pain and leisure led more and more to the stimulants
that were poison in his condition. At last a chill mercifully hastened
matters, and Pat, suffering less than he had for some months past, was
nearing his end in semi-consciousness. Molly Dexter then descended on
the Moloneys in one of