th this grievance.

"Talked about? But who--"

"Never mind! I know! I've been told!" she interrupted him.

"Oh! I see!" He was now understanding the cause of her trouble in Sarah
Gailey's bedroom.

"Now look here!" He went on. "I've just got to have a few words with
you. You come across the road, please." He was imperious.

She raised her glance for a timid moment to his face, and saw to her
intense astonishment that he also was blushing. Never before had she
seen him blush.

"Come along!" he urged.

She followed him obediently across the dangerous road. He waited for her
at the opposite kerb, and then they went up Ship Street. He turned into
the entrance of the Chichester, which was grandiose, with a flight of
shallow steps, and then a porch with two basket chairs, and then another
flight of shallow steps ending in double doors which were noticeably
higher than the street level. She still followed.

"Nobody in here, I expect," said George Cannon, indicating a door on the
right, to an old waiter who stood in the dark hall.

"No, sir."

George Cannon opened the door as a master, ushered Hilda into a tiny
room furnished with a desk and two chairs, and shut the door.

III

The small window was of ground glass and gave no prospect of the outer
world, from which it seemed to Hilda that she was as completely cut off
as in a prison. She was alone with George Cannon, and beyond the narrow
walls which caged them together, and close together, there was nothing!
All Brighton, save this room, had ceased to exist. Hilda was now more
than ever affrighted, shamed, perturbed, agonised. Yet at the same time
she had the desperate calm of the captain of a ship about to founder
with all hands. And she saw glimpses, beautiful and compensatory, of the
romantic quality of common life. She was in a little office of a
perfectly ordinary boarding-house--(she could even detect the stale
odours of cooking)--with a realistic man of business, and they were
about to discuss a perfectly ordinary piece of scandal; and surely they
might be called two common-sense people! And withal, the ordinariness
and the midland gumption of the scene were shot through with the bright
exotic rays of romance! She thought: "It is painful and humiliating to
be caught and fixed as I am. But it is wonderful too!"

"The fact is," said George Cannon, in an easy reassuring tone, "we never
get the chance of a bit of quiet chat. Upon my soul we don't! Now I
s