ed at the corner of the
Brixton Road and the driver came to the door to ask what number.

Micky scrambled out.

"Oh, I'll walk the rest of the way."

He paid the man liberally, and set out along the crowded pathway.
There were so many people about that he thought it must be a market
day or something. A word with a policeman elicited the information
that he was at quite the wrong end of the street for the number he
wanted. Micky was rather glad. He felt that he needed time in which to
collect his thoughts, and yet when at last he reached his destination
he felt as nervous as a kitten and strongly inclined to go back. But
he went on and up the bare strip of garden which led to the front door
of the house. It wasn't such a bad-looking house, he thought. Not
nearly as bad as he had expected from the girl's description. In fact,
once upon a time it must have been rather a palatial residence, but
all the windows now were boxed up with cheap, starchy-looking
curtains, and there was a sort of third-rate atmosphere about the
basement and the cheap knocker on the front door.

Micky looked for a bell, but there wasn't one, so he knocked.

It seemed a long time before anybody came. When at last they did he
heard them coming for a long time before the door was opened, heard
slipshod steps on shiny linoleum, and a husky sort of breathless
cough.

The owner of the cough was young and scared-looking, in shoes several
sizes too large for her, and a skirt several inches too short. When
Micky asked for Miss Shepstone she stared without answering for a
moment, then she turned and slopped back the way she had come, leaving
the door on the chain.

Micky chuckled to himself; she evidently did not like the look of
him.

He waited patiently; then he heard another step along the shiny
linoleumed floor of the hall--a very different step this time--and,
turning eagerly, he saw Esther herself in the doorway.

"I didn't really think you would come," she said breathlessly.

For a moment Micky could not find his tongue. If he had thought this
girl pretty last night with the tears in her eyes he thought her a
thousand times prettier now. She looked as if some magician hand had
wiped the distress from her face and convinced her that the sun still
shone.

She wore the same clothes she had worn last night, but even they
seemed somehow to have changed. There was a bunch of violets pinned in
her jacket. Micky wondered if it were the violets t