wn glass, and went on. He
was now tremulous with the excitement of his reminiscences; he fidgeted
on the chair, and his narrative became more jerky than ever.

"Her letter came, posted in London. She had taken leave of the Becket
party, and was supposed to be travelling homewards; but she would keep
her word with me. I was to go and see her at an hotel in the West End.
Go, I did, punctually enough; I believe I would have gone to Yokohama
for half an hour of her society. I found her in a private sitting-room,
looking wretched enough, confoundedly ill. And then and there she told
me her story. It was a queer one; no one could have guessed it."

He seized the poker and stirred the fire savagely.

"I shall just give you the plain facts. Her father was a builder in a
small way, living at Bristol. He had made a little money, and was able
to give his children a decent education. There was a son, who died
young, and then two girls, Lilian the elder of them. The old man must
have been rather eccentric; he brought up the girls very strictly
(their mother died when they were children)--would scarcely let them go
out of his sight, preached to them a sort of mixture of Christianity
and Pantheism, forbade all pleasures except those of home, didn't like
them to make acquaintances. Their mother's sister kept the house; a
feeble, very pious creature, probably knowing as much about life as the
cat or the canary--so Lilian describes her. The man came to a sudden
end; a brick fell on his head whilst he was going over a new building.
Lilian was then about fifteen. She had passed the Oxford Local, and was
preparing herself to teach--or rather, being prepared at a good school.

"Allen left enough money to provide his daughters with about a hundred
a year each; this was to be theirs absolutely when they came of age, or
when they married. The will had been carefully drawn up, and provided
against all sorts of real and imaginary dangers. The one thing it
couldn't provide against was the imbecility of the old aunt, who still
had the girls in her care.

"A couple of years went by, and Lilian became a teacher in the school
she had attended. Do you know anything about Bristol and the
neighbourhood? It seems that the people there are in the habit of going
to a place called Weston-super-Mare--excursion steamers, and so on.
Well, the girls and their aunt went to spend a day at Weston, and on
the boat they somehow made acquaintance with a young man