given me a champagne supper in your day! Well! and how are you?"

"Nicely, thank you, Miss O'Meara; you see I have not forgotten!" Then in
a lower voice, "But I thought the Signora left you money?"

"She did, bless her; but it was here one day and gone the next!
Good-night, and good luck to you," she laughed.

The little duenna of a dead genius evidently did not want him to stay,
and he felt his way down the pitch dark stairs, and emerged on the
street. A very small, brown hand was held out for a penny, and for the
first time in his life he refused a street beggar with real regret.

"'Here one moment, and gone the next,'" he muttered, looking down the
brilliantly lighted street to where the motors, carriages, and cabs
crowded round the doors of a great theatre. "It's the history of the
whole show in a nutshell."

If Sir Edmund was troubled at the thought that Molly believed in him,
Molly was infinitely more troubled at his belief in her.

After he left her she went to her room. She had to dine out and she must
get some rest first. As in most of the late eighteenth century houses in
London, the bedrooms had been sacrificed to the rooms below. But Molly
had the one very large room that looked over the park. She threw
herself down on a wide sofa close to the silk-curtained bed. The sun
glinted still on the silver backs of the brushes and teased her eyes,
and she got up and drew down the blinds. The dressing-table was large
and its glass top was covered with a great weight of old gilt bottles
and boxes.

Miss Carew had once been amused by the comment of a young manicurist
who, after expressing enthusiastic admiration of the table, had
concluded with the words:

"But what I often say to myself is that it's only so much more to leave
in the end."

But Molly had not laughed when the words were repeated; they gave
expression to a feeling with which she sometimes looked at many things
besides her dressing-table--they might all prove only so much more to
leave in the end!

She sank exhausted again onto the sofa. Why had he come? Why could he
not leave her alone? Did she want his friendship, his pity, his
confidence? Why look at her so kindly when he must know how he hurt her?
She had felt such joy when she saw that he believed in her. The idea
that she was still innocent and unblemished in his eyes was just for the
moment an unutterable relief. An unutterable relief, too, it had felt at
the moment, to be able to acc