s an old teapot, but you see now what I mean. I'm
always having to explain you, to tell--"

"Don't do it. I'll forgive much, but not explaining. Your lion
doesn't roar well, still, a lion is worth seeing--once." I turned to
Selwyn. "I beg your pardon. Did you speak to me?"

"I asked if I could take you to Scarborough Square. I have a taxi
here."

"Thank you, but I am spending the night with Kitty. I am not going
back."

In astonishment Kitty looked at me, then turned away. I had told her I
could not stay. I had not intended to stay, but I could not talk to
Selwyn to-night. There would not be time and there was too much I
wanted to say.

Selwyn's shoulders made shrug that was barely perceptible, and without
offering his hand he said good night. In the hall I heard him speak to
Kitty, then the closing of the door and the starting of the taxi, then
silence.

Dawn was breaking when at last I slept.

CHAPTER XIII

I have not seen Selwyn since the night of Kitty's dinner-party. He
has been back three days. If he wished to see me before he went
away, why does he not come to see me now? Daily I determine I will
let no thought of him come into my mind. The purposes for which I
came to Scarborough Square will be defeated if I continue to think of
this unimaginable happening that is with me day and night, this
peculiar behavior of which he makes no explanation. I determine not
to think, and thought is ever with me.

I was silly, foolish, quixotic to hope that here, in this little
world of workaday people, he might be brought to see that personal
acquisition and advance is not enough to give life meaning, to
justify what it exacts. I was foolish. We are more apart than when
I came.

Mrs. Mundy, in her blue cotton dress, a band of embroidery in the
neck of its close-fitting basque, and around her waist a long, white
apron which reached beyond her ample hips to the middle of her back,
lingered this morning, dust-cloth in hand, at the door of my
sitting-room. There was something else she wanted to say.

"I'm mighty 'fraid little Gertie Archer is going to have what we used
to call a galloping case." She went over to the window, where she
felt the earth in its flower-box to see if it were moist. "She's a
pretty child, and she was terrible anxious to go to one of them
open-air schools on the roof, but there wasn't any room. It's too
late now."

The upper ends of the dust-cloth were fitted tog