e, her first
letter to him, the evening before, and he did not expect another till
that night; but when the second postman knocked at the door, and, a
moment later, Mrs. Benn came creaking upstairs, he hurried to meet her,
hoping the envelope might bear the West London postmark. But he was
doomed to disappointment. The letter was from Ida, his sister in
Northampton. "When I heard from you last week you said any day this week
would do," Ida Fenton wrote. "We find we shall be able to have you
to-morrow, and hope you will stay four or five days. The best train is
one at 2:15, and I will meet you by that, so you need not worry about
answering this note. We are all looking forward to seeing you, and
though, of course Joseph is at business all day, and the children at
school, I daresay you will find the rest do you good."

Jimmy frowned as he folded it up and put it back into the envelope. He
had arranged to spend the next day with Lalage; they were going to have
a run out somewhere--"somewhere inexpensive, like the Crystal Palace,"
Lalage had said in her letter--and then they were going to have another
of those delightful marketing expeditions in the grimy street where the
barrows were. Now, all that would have to be postponed. Jimmy would not
have scrupled greatly about disappointing Ida--she had been in no hurry
to see him--but May's letter had shown him how he was being watched and
his doings reported, and he did not want to arouse further suspicion. He
intended to move very shortly, though his plans were as yet but half
formed, and, moreover, he shrank from doing anything which would offend
May. He might not be afraid of his relations; but at the back of his
mind he was sufficiently conscious of his own departure from the paths
of rectitude to feel the weakness of his position.

He wrote to Lalage that evening, explaining matters; consequently, she
was not surprised when he came up next morning carrying a handbag. At
first, it struck him that she was looking rather pale and worried, but
she greeted him with frank pleasure, and, in a few minutes, she was her
usual self again. As Jimmy learned later, she had in a peculiar degree
the art of seeing the best side of things. In a sense, she was almost a
fatalist, and though she made no disguise about the regret she felt for
her ruined life, a moment later she always seemed to put the regrets
aside as useless. "I try to keep as respectable as I can," she said to
Jimmy.

Norm