with shame. Gertrude, looking up at him
from the manuscript she brooded over, instinctively made way for him to
pass.

It was she who spoke first. Her finger was on the pencil-marks again.

"Then that," said she, pointing, "that is not to stand?"

"Of course it isn't." He answered coldly. "It wasn't meant to. It's
rubbed out."

He looked at her for the first time with dislike. He did not suspect her
as the source of abominable suggestion. He was only thinking that if it
hadn't been for her he wouldn't have seen any of these things.

She shrank before his look. "Does he think I wanted him to see it?" she
said to herself.

Already she was clean in her own eyes. Already she had persuaded herself
that she had not wanted that. And in the same breath of thought she
asked herself, "What _did_ he see?"

She smiled as she answered his cold answer.

"I thought it was rubbed out, but I couldn't be quite sure."

They were so absorbed that they did not hear the door open.

[Illustration: Jane stood in the doorway, quietly regarding them]

Jane stood in the doorway quietly regarding them.

LXV

There were people who knew for a fact that Jane Holland (Mrs. Hugh
Brodrick) had run away with George Tanqueray. The rumour ran through the
literary circles shunned by Tanqueray and Jane. The theory of her guilt
was embraced with excitement by the dreadful, clever little people. Not
one of them would have confessed to a positive desire to catch her
tripping. But now that the thing had happened it satisfied the craving
for complete vision of the celebrated lady. It reduced considerably her
baffling eminence, and dispersed once for all the impenetrable,
irritating atmosphere of secrecy she had kept up.

There was George Tanqueray, too, who had kept it up even longer and more
successfully. At last they had been caught, the two so insolent in their
swift evasion of pursuit. Their fall, so to speak, enabled the hunter to
come up with them. People who had complained that they could never meet
them, who had wanted to meet them solely that they might talk about them
afterwards, who had never been able to talk about them at all, had now
abundant material for conversation.

The rumour, once it had fairly penetrated, spread over London in five
days. It started in Kensington, ran thence all the way to Chelsea,
skipped to Bloomsbury, and spread from these centres into Belgravia and
Mayfair. In three weeks the tale of George Tanqu