rved and cold, in the heat of your two hands.

During the first fortnight, she asked no questions. What had happened
was obvious. She learnt from the people on the second floor in the
office of the railway company that Traill had left his rooms; but
under what circumstances and why, she made no inquiries. Brought face
to face with the exigencies in the lives of others, there is a fund
of common sense to be found in the character of the revolutionary
woman. That Janet Hallard was an artist, now with a studio of sorts
of her own, says nothing for her temperament and less for her art.
She had no conception of the higher life, and to her mind the inner
mysticism was a jumble of confused nonsense--the blind leading the
blind, for whom the ultimate ditch was a bastard theosophy. As a
matter of fact, Janet had no mean ideas of design; but they were
vigorous and, for her living, she had to struggle against the
overwhelming sentimentalism of the _nouveau_ art.

In dealing with Sally then, a subject needing tact, common sense and
an unyielding strength of purpose, she was more than eminently fitted
to save her from the edge of the precipice towards which she had found
her so blindly stumbling. It was just such a moment as when one sees
one's dearest friend walking blindly to the verge of an abyss and
knows that too sudden a cry, too swift a movement to save them, may
plunge their reckless body for ever into eternity. In this moment,
Janet kept her wits. With infinite care, with infinite tenderness,
never weakening to the importunate demands that were made of her,
giving up her work, giving up every other interest that she had, she
slowly drew Sally back into the steady current of existence; saw day
by day the life come tardily again into the bloodless cheeks, and
watched the smearing shadows beneath the hollow eyes as they
disappeared.

Then, at the end of a fortnight, she learnt in quavering sentences
from Sally's lips, trembling as they told it, the story of her
desertion.

"You shouldn't have followed him, Sally," she whispered gently at
its conclusion.

"I know I shouldn't--I know I shouldn't. And so I know of course he
isn't to blame. It's that woman--his sister. I always knew she hated
me--knew it! She used to look at me like you look at soiled things
in a shop! She pointed me out to him in the theatre. I can guess the
things she said. She brought the other--the other one to see him.
Oh, wasn't it cunning of her? Mus