re
I put myself in a sweat about the mater again. I thought--I don't know
what I thought, and all the time she was half asleep and having her hair
brushed. She made me feel ass number one. Good night."

"Good night."

The boy shut the window, bent down and bolted it on the inside.

Dion looked at the gray coming of the new day.

CHAPTER IX

Liverpool has a capacity for looking black which is perhaps, only
surpassed by Manchester's, and it looked its blackest on a day at the
end of March in the following year, as the afternoon express from London
roared into the Lime Street Station. The rain was coming down; it was
small rain, and it descended with a sort of puny determination; it was
sad rain without any dash, any boldness; it had affinities with
the mists which sweep over stretches of moorland, but its power of
saturation was remarkable. It soaked Liverpool. It issued out of
blackness and seemed to carry a blackness with it which descended into
the very soul of the city and lay coiled there like a snake.

Lady Ingleton was very sensitive to her surroundings, and as she lifted
the rug from her knees, and put away the book she had been reading,
she shivered. A deep melancholy floated over her and enveloped her. She
thought, "Why did I come upon this adventure? What is it all to do
with me?" But then the face of a man rose up before her, lean, brown,
wrinkled, ravaged, with an expression upon it that for a long time had
haunted her, throwing a shadow upon her happiness. And she felt that
she had done right to come. Impulse, perhaps, had driven her; sentiment
rather than reason had been her guide. Nevertheless, she did not regret
her journey. Even if nothing good came of it she would not regret it.
She would have tried for once at some small expense to herself to do a
worthy action. She would for once have put all selfishness behind her.

A white-faced porter, looking anxious and damp, appeared at the door of
the corridor. Lady Ingleton's French maid arrived from the second class
with Turkish Jane on her arm.

"Oh, Miladi, how black it is here!" she exclaimed, twisting her pointed
little nose. "The black it reaches the heart."

That was exactly what Lady Ingleton was thinking, but she said, in a
voice less lazy than usual.

"There's a capital hotel, Annette. We shall be very comfortable."

"Shall we stay here long, Miladi?"

"No; but I don't know how long yet. Is Jane all right?"

"She has been looking