she would be able to get out to
Italy and to live there for three weeks before she need call herself
penniless.

She went to the window and stood for a while looking out. The houses
opposite and all down the road were exactly alike, all featureless and
grey, roofed with slate, three-storied, with basement kitchens. Nearly
every one of them had "Apartments" in gilt letters on the fanlight
over the front door. It was raining. The pavements were wet and there
was mud on the roadway. The woman who lived in the corner house was
spring-cleaning. Olive saw her helping the servant to take down the
curtains in the front room. Dust and tea-leaves and last year's
cobwebs. It occurred to her that spring would bring a recurrence of
these things only if she became a useful help, as she must if she
stayed in England and earned her living as best she could--only these
and nothing more. The idea was horrible and she shuddered at it. "I
shall go," she said aloud. "I shall go."

CHAPTER II

Olive, advised by a clerk in Cook's office, had taken a through ticket
to Siena, third class to Dover, first on the boat, second in France
and Italy. She got to Victoria in good time, had her luggage labelled,
secured a corner seat, and, having twenty minutes to spare, strolled
round the bookstall, eyeing the illustrated weeklies and the cheap
reprints. The blue and gold of a shilling edition of Keats lay ready
to her hand and she picked it up and opened it.

The girl, true lover of all beauty, flushed with pleasure at the dear,
familiar word music, the sound of Arcadian pipes heard faintly for a
moment above the harsh roar of London. For her the dead poet's voice
rose clearly through the clamour of the living; it was like the silver
wailing of a violin in a blaring discord of brass instruments.

She laid down the book reluctantly, and turning, met the eager eyes of
the man who stood beside her. He had just bought an armful of current
literature, and his business at the bookstall was evidently done, yet
he lingered for an appreciable instant. He, too, was a lover of
beauty, and in his heart he was saying, "Oh, English rose!"

He did not look English himself. He wore his black hair rather longer
than is usual in this country, and there was a curiously vivid look, a
suggestion of fire about him, which is conspicuously lacking in the
average Briton, whose ambition it is to look as cool as possible. His
face was thin and his eyes were deep s