three months, Louis had come to the
nursing home to see her. His hands, as he seized her passionately, felt
hard and stuck to her thin silk blouse.

"Louis!" she cried, taking one of the hands in hers, which had grown
very soft and white, "I've seen them pretty bad before with the gorse.
But whatever have you been doing? Where have you been? They're like a
navvy's hands!"

"Were you worried about me, old girl?" he asked.

"No, but dreadfully curious," she began. He took a roll of dirty notes
out of his pocket and threw it in her lap.

"Look! Alone I did it! Monish, old girl! Filthy lucre! Just enough to
take us home. I meant to do it off my own bat, without asking your
uncle!"

"But how on earth could you, in the time?" she asked.

"Navvying! That bally railway cutting at Cook's Wall! Lord, Marcella, if
I don't get the Pater to pay for me to go to the hospital, I'll do a
year first on the music-halls as the modern Hercules. I should make
millions! My hands were blistered till they got like iron; my back felt
broken; I used to lie awake at nights and weep till I got toughened. I
had a few fights, too."

"Why? Didn't they like you?"

"No, they're not so silly as you. They resented my English
particularly, and they resented my funking whisky when they were all
boozing. They thought I was being superior. Lord, if they'd known! One
night, when they were calling me Jesus' Little Lamb and Wonky Willie, I
saw red and tackled an Irishman. Of course, he knocked me out of time. I
knew he would. And just to show them that I wasn't wonky, and wasn't a
Cocoa Fiend--that was another name they had for me--I downed a tumbler
full of whisky neat."

She drew a deep breath.

"Oh, don't worry! It made me damned sick! Lord, wasn't I bad! There's
something in my brain so fed up with the stuff that my body won't give
it house-room."

"Good thing too," said Marcella.

"I'm not so sure," he said reflectively. "In a way, it's weak. Whisky
still beats me, you see. There ought not to be anything on earth one's
afraid of."

"I think that's a bit morbid. I'm very much afraid of snails, and I
certainly don't think I'm called upon to go and caress snails."

"Ah, this is different. This isn't physical. It's psychological. Just
as, once, I hungered for whisky, now I loathe and dread it. The ideal
thing would be to be indifferent to it. That may come in time."

Marcella asked him nothing about herself. What the doctors had told him
sh