hat he had forfeited by his choice of a calling--equal contact
with the little circle of people who gave life its crowning grace and
facility; and the next moment he was blushing at this reversal of his
standards, and wondering, almost contemptuously, what could be the
nature of the woman whose mere presence could produce such a change.

But there was no struggling against her influence; and as, the night
before, he had looked at Westmore with the nurse's eyes, so he now found
himself seeing his house as it must appear to Mrs. Westmore. He noticed
the shabby yellow paint of the palings, the neglected garden of their
neighbour, the week's wash flaunting itself indecently through the
denuded shrubs about the kitchen porch; and as he admitted his
companions to the narrow passage he was assailed by the expected whiff
of "boiled dinner," with which the steam of wash-tubs was intimately
mingled.

Duplain was in the passage; he had just come out of the kitchen, and the
fact that he had been washing his hands in the sink was made evident by
his rolled-back shirt-sleeves, and by the shiny redness of the knuckles
he was running through his stiff black hair.

"Hallo, John," he said, in his aggressive voice, which rose abruptly at
sight of Amherst's companions; and at the same moment the frowsy
maid-of-all-work, crimson from stooping over the kitchen stove, thrust
her head out to call after him: "See here, Mr. Duplain, don't you leave
your cravat laying round in my dough."

V

MRS. WESTMORE stayed just long enough not to break in too abruptly on
the flow of her friend's reminiscences, and to impress herself on Mrs.
Amherst's delighted eyes as an embodiment of tactfulness and
grace--looking sympathetically about the little room, which, with its
books, its casts, its photographs of memorable pictures, seemed, after
all, a not incongruous setting to her charms; so that when she rose to
go, saying, as her hand met Amherst's, "Tonight, then, you must tell me
all about those poor Dillons," he had the sense of having penetrated so
far into her intimacy that a new Westmore must inevitably result from
their next meeting.

"Say, John--the boss is a looker," Duplain commented across the
dinner-table, with the slangy grossness he sometimes affected; but
Amherst left it to his mother to look a quiet rebuke, feeling himself
too aloof from such contacts to resent them.

He had to rouse himself with an effort to take in the overseer'