he said, looking at him with wet eyes.

"I have you," he said. "Oh, thank God, I have you! but I shall never
write another great book."

And he never has.

But he is very happy. And Sybil cannot see that his later works are not
in the same field with the first. She thinks the critics fools. And he
loves her the more for her folly.

XIII

ALCIBIADES

"Oh, _do_ let me have him in the carriage with me; he won't hurt any
one, he's a perfect angel."

"Angels like him travels in the dog-box," said the porter.

Judy ended an agonised search for her pocket.

"Would you be offended," she said, "if I offered you half-a-crown?"

"Give the guard a bob, Miss." The hand curved into a cup resting on the
carriage window, answered her question. "It's more'n enough for him,
being a single man, whereas me, I'm risking my situation and nine
children at present to say no more, when I----"

The turn of a railway key completed the sentence.

Judy and the angel were alone. He was a very nice angel--long-haired and
brownly-black--his race the Aberdeen, his name Alcibiades. He put up a
respectful and adoring nose, and his mistress kissed him between the
eyes.

"How could they try to part us," she asked, "when there's only us two
left?"

Alcibiades, with swimming eyes, echoed in a little moan of true love the
question: "How could they?"

The question was put again by both later in the day. Judy was to stay
with an aunt while her mother sailed to Madeira to meet there the father
returning from South Africa, full of wounds and honour, and to spend on
the Island what was left of the winter. Now it was December.

A thick fog covered London with a veil of ugliness; the cabman was
aggrieved and aggrieving--Alcibiades had tried to bite him--and Judy was
on the verge of tears when the fog at last lifted, and allowed her to be
driven to her aunt's suburban house, yellow brickish, with a slate roof
and a lean forecourt, wherein cypresses, stunted and blackened, spoke
eloquently of lives more blank than the death whose emblem they were.

Through the slits of the drab Venetian blinds, gaslight streamed into
the winter dusk.

"There'll be tea, anyhow," sighed Judy, recklessly overpaying the
cabman.

Inside the house where the lights were, the Aunt was surrounded by a
dozen ladies of about her own age and station; "Tabbies" the world might
have called them. All were busy with mysteries of many coloured silks
and satins, lace a