Just beyond the threshold in the dim-lit hall stood Maida, fumbling in
her bag for her key. She looked up in alarm as Mary Louise opened the
door. It was ludicrous, the expression on the flat face. Behind her
stood the cook--the man from the army. He turned away as Mary Louise
stepped out and pretended to look out the hall window.

Mary Louise had decided on a more moderate course. She had decided to
forget the matter for the time being. But the sight of the boy, there
in the hall, was disconcerting. Nevertheless, it was with a forced
cheeriness that she spoke:

"Don't need your key, after all. I was just going out for a little
while." It was trite enough civility.

Maida looked up at her dully, and Mary Louise stepped to the left and
was on the point of passing on down the hall. As she walked away, the
boy moved to the door, fingering his hat, and took one step across the
threshold after Maida, who had preceded him, into the darkened room.

And then Mary Louise turned around. At her step he paused and looked
quickly up.

"There's a chair by the window," she said, indicating a group of
armchairs clustered there and a tall fern in a glazed pot on a
pedestal. "You can wait there." She had spoken on the impulse, and her
voice sounded strangely vibrant and remote even to herself, like the
voice of a third person. She was trembling slightly.

The boy looked at her, flushed a little, seemed undecided.

The light switched on and Maida appeared at the door.

"Come on in, Tim," she said, looking strangely at Mary Louise.

An overpowering anger came swelling in the latter's veins. She walked
back to the door and stood before the placid bovine figure of her
room-mate. For a moment she could not trust herself to speak, she was
trembling so.

"I said for him to wait outside--there," she repeated with quavering
emphasis.

Maida's face looked flat and large and sober. There was a great, vast,
pasty blank of cheek from her sombre eyes to the downcast corner of
her mouth. "I heard you," she replied. "Come in, Tim."

Mary Louise felt impotent. She watched the face before her, stolid,
immutable, expressionless. She felt suffocated for breath. She plucked
at her skirts with her fingers. Finally she gasped out:

"Not--not into my room. If he does, I'm through with it--and you. You
understand?"

Maida shrugged her shoulders, and a slight smile curled the corners of
her lips. She turned away.

"That's your lookout, not