of her shoulders. Pam was appalled,
much as a man might have been, for she herself had never been
hysterical, and this mixture of anguish and anger, given vent to so
openly, was a strange and horrible thing to her.

However, she knew enough to let the storm pass without interruption,
although it took nearly ten minutes for it to subside, and then, while
Brigit, her face red and disfigured, sat up and smoothed back her hair
and wiped her eyes, Pam spoke.

"It must be lunch-time," she said with great wisdom, and Brigit rose,
with a nod.

"I'll go for a walk. Don't want any lunch."

"All right. Good-bye."

Then they separated, Pam going up the sunny slope to her husband and
children, Brigit, down through the deserted garden of a long uninhabited
house, to the lonely sea.

CHAPTER THREE

Brigit left the villa the next morning and went straight to London. And
the nearer she got to the old town which contained, for her, the very
kernel of life, her spirits mounted and mounted in spite of herself. She
had for so long been "down among the dead men," as Tommy called
depression, that her sudden change of mood affected her strangely.

"If I must never see him again," she repeated over and over again aloud
to herself, in the solitude of her compartment, "I shall at least see
him once, and--hear him speak. I'll make him play to me, too; and I
shall see his big unseeing eyes, and his wonderful hands!" The very
wheels of the train seemed to be saying, "I'll see him, I'll see him,
I'll see him," and when she landed at Dover, in a pouring rain, she
could have laughed aloud for sheer joy.

Her mother was living in town, in the tiny house in Pont Street, but had
gone to the country for the week-end, so the girl, to her great delight,
was alone with the servants.

Putting on a dressing-gown she sat down by her fire and closed her eyes.

"Three months, a fortnight, and six days," she thought. "It seems years.
I wonder what he will say to me? Will he be glad to see me? And--how am
I to do? Shall I tell Theo, and make him tell? Or shall I be brave--as
Pam would--and tell him myself!"

Then, realising her absurdity in forgetting that after all it was more
Theo's affair than his father's, she laughed aloud.

It was easy to laugh, for whatever happened she would see Victor
Joyselle that evening, and beyond that she could not, would not, look.
The world might end to-morrow, and it mattered nothing to her. That
night he an