ances and tastes, and always there
was something, something that was with them unspoken, unacknowledged,
which made all these things unreal and insincere.

Yet out of their talk he began to form vague ideas of the home from
which she came. There was, of course, no servant, and the mother was
something meandering, furtive, tearful in the face of troubles.
Sometimes of an afternoon or evening she grew garrulous. "Mother does
talk so--sometimes." She rarely went out of doors. Chaffery always
rose late, and would sometimes go away for days together. He was mean;
he allowed only a weekly twenty-five shillings for housekeeping, and
sometimes things grew unsatisfactory at the week-end. There seemed to
be little sympathy between mother and daughter; the widow had been
flighty in a dingy fashion, and her marriage with her chief lodger
Chaffery had led to unforgettable sayings. It was to facilitate this
marriage that Ethel had been sent to Whortley, so that was counted a
mitigated evil. But these were far-off things, remote and unreal down
the long, ill-lit vista of the suburban street which swallowed up
Ethel nightly. The walk, her warmth and light and motion close to him,
her clear little voice, and the touch of her hand; that was reality.

The shadow of Chaffery and his deceptions lay indeed across all these
things, sometimes faint, sometimes dark and present. Then Lewisham
became insistent, his sentimental memories ceased, and he asked
questions that verged on gulfs of doubt. Had she ever "helped"? She
had not, she declared. Then she added that twice at home she had "sat
down" to complete the circle. She would never help again. That she
promised--if it needed promising. There had already been dreadful
trouble at home about the exposure at Lagune's. Her mother had sided
with her stepfather and joined in blaming her. But was she to blame?

"Of _course_ you were not to blame," said Lewisham. Lagune, he
learnt, had been unhappy and restless for the three days after the
_seance_--indulging in wearisome monologue--with Ethel as sole auditor
(at twenty-one shillings a week). Then he had decided to give Chaffery
a sound lecture on his disastrous dishonesty. But it was Chaffery
gave the lecture. Smithers, had he only known it, had been overthrown
by a better brain than Lagune's, albeit it spoke through Lagune's
treble.

Ethel did not like talking of Chaffery and these other things. "If you
knew how sweet it was to forget it all,"