ction, with their silk hats tilted a little back, were saying:

"Poor old Aggie! She's off!" "Completely off!" "Is it drink, I wonder?"

And then, seeing me, they said:

"Gad, here's a nice little gal, though!" "No rouge, neither!" "By Jove,
no! Her face is as white as a waterlily!"

Seeing that they were wheeling round, and fearing they were going to
speak to me, I moved back and so came face to face with the woman, who
was standing where they had left her, silent now, and looking after the
men with fierce eyes under the fair hair that curled over her forehead.

Then in a moment a memory from the far past swept over me, and I cried,
almost as if the name had been forced out of me:

"Sister Angela!"

The woman started, and it seemed for a moment as if she were going to
run away. Then she laid hold of me by the arm and, looking searchingly
into my face, said:

"Who are you? . . . I know. You are Mary O'Neill, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"I knew you were. I read about your marriage to that . . . that man. And
now you are wondering why I am here. Well, come home with me and see."

It was not until afterwards that I knew by what mistake about my
presence in that place Angela thought she must justify herself in my
eyes (mine!); but taking me by the hand, just as she used to do when I
was a child, she led, almost pulled, me down Piccadilly, and my will was
so broken that I did not attempt to resist her.

We crossed Piccadilly Circus, with its white sheet of electric light,
and, turning into the darker thoroughfares on the northern side of it,
walked on until, in a narrow street of the Italian quarter of Soho, we
stopped at a private door by the side of a cafe that had an Italian name
on the window.

"This is where we live. Come in," said Angela, and I followed her
through a long empty lobby and up three flights of bare stairs.

While we ascended, there was the deadened sound, as from the cafe, of
men singing (in throbbing voices to mandolines and guitars) one of the
Italian songs which I remembered to have heard from the piazza outside
the convent on that night when Sister Angela left me in bed while she
went off to visit the chaplain:

"_Oh bella Napoli, Oh suol beato
Onde sorridere volle il creato._"

"The Italian Club," said Angela. "Only one flight more. Come!"

ONE HUNDRED AND FIRST CHAPTER

At length Angela opened, with a key from her satchel, a door on the top
landing, and we entered a