eflected with astonishment upon the hesitating but convincing
air with which Janet had lied to him. Janet!

"After what you've done"--she paused, and went on with unblurred
clearness--"after what you've insisted on doing, I don't want there to
be any misunderstanding. I'm not a widow. My husband's in prison.
He'll be in prison for another six or seven years. That's all I wanted
to tell you."

"I'm very sorry," he breathed. "I'd no idea you'd had this trouble."
What could he say? What could anybody have said?

"I ought to have told you at once," she said. "I ought to have told you
last night." Another pause. "Then perhaps you wouldn't have come again
this morning."

"Yes, I should!" he asserted eagerly. "If you're in a hole, you're in a
hole. What difference could it possibly make whether you were a widow
or not?"

"Oh!" she said. "The wife of a convict... you know!" He felt that she
was evading the point.

She went on: "It's a good thing my three old ladies don't know,
anyhow...! I'd no chance to tell you this morning. You were too much
for me."

"I don't care whose wife you are!" he muttered, as though to himself, as
though resenting something said by some one who had gone away and left
him. "If you're in a hole, you're in a hole."

She turned and looked at him. His eyes fell before hers.

"Well," she said. "I've told you. I must go. I haven't a moment.
Good night." She held out her hand. "You don't want me to thank you a
lot, do you?"

"That I don't!" he exclaimed.

"Good night."

"But--"

"I really must go."

He rose and gave his hand. The next instant she was gone.

There was a deafening roar in his head. It was the complete destruction
by earthquake of a city of dreams. A calamity which left nothing--even
to be desired! A tremendous silence reigned after the event.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE.

On the following evening, when from the windows of the
London-to-Manchester express he saw in the gloom the high-leaping flames
of the blast-furnaces that seem to guard eternally the southern frontier
of the Five Towns, he felt that he had returned into daily reality out
of an impossible world. Waiting for the loop-line train in the familiar
tedium of Knype platform, staring at the bookstall, every item on which
he knew by heart and despised, surrounded once more by local
physiognomies, gestures, and accent, he thought to