(Buck, by the way, was returned at the head of the poll, a few weeks later, amid acclamations that might well have rendered him deaf in his other ear also.)

Back in the Club once more, Louie set aside the best chop, and made a tour of the place in search of the narrowest table. The one she chose was so narrow that the backs of the two chairs she turned up against it almost touched. Lightheartedly she rebuked Myrtle Morris, who asked her whether she was expecting "a boy"; and she laughed as Myrtle went off to tell another girl that "Causton was on the warpath." Her warpaint consisted of a white blouse, low and perfectly plain at the neck, and a navy blue skirt. She was waiting at the window for Jim twenty minutes before he came.

She had schooled herself to a rigorous composure. She opened the door for him and told him to mind the hall lamp, within an inch of which his hat reached; and the hand she gave him was not gloved this time.

But she barely touched his hand; had she not two whole hours before her? He put aside a cheap hanging of rustling beads for her to pa.s.s, and then followed her into the large room on the left of the hall, empty save for a piano and a few chairs, that was used for parties and tableaux. Myrtle and another girl appeared for a moment in the doorway; the minxes appeared to be waltzing, but they had come to see who "Causton's boy" was; and as they sat down she asked him, as if daring him to find any but the plainer meaning in it, how Billy Izzard was. She exulted that she could say these things and he could not.

Then she was told that their chops were ready. They pa.s.sed into the next room.

The table--it was a flimsy card-table covered with a cheap traycloth stiff with starch--accounted for all awkwardnesses and proximities; again she found it secretly delicious to murmur a demure apology for its smallness. She lingered over the eating of her chop merely because her plate was edge to edge with his; she would manage badly if she could not keep him at least two hours! Then, when she could linger out her eating no longer, she asked him for a cigarette and a light--for in the studios she had learned to smoke. He gave them to her. Her lids hovered as he held the match; she wondered whether she should look straight into his eyes or keep her lids downcast. In the end she did both, looking at him first, then down. Whether he looked at her at all she did not know; the first at any rate was a miss. She did not ask for a second match (she had, she told herself, some shame); instead, she put her elbows on the table and said, without further delay: "Well, what is it?"

She nodded as he began to tell her; it seemed to be pretty much what she had expected. She listened, or half listened; she would not have sworn, had he challenged her, that her attention did not wander a little. Her thoughts were ahead of his, but a little patience--he would catch up; he would see presently that what his wife might think or what she might not think (for that was what he was talking about) was of less practical importance than he supposed. Naturally his wife must be thinking this and that; marriage that left such a thing as a--call it a private execution--out of the calculation might even turn out to be a little difficult; but she might as well hear what he had to say about it. She waited for the cropping up of the names of Miriam Levey and Kitty Windus; they duly appeared. Mrs. Jeffries, it seemed, wanted to see Kitty, and Miriam Levey wanted her to do so. Why they wanted these things was not very clear, but possibly, if Louie was giving him only half her attention, Jim was not saying all he knew either. He still considered that aspect of the affair to be wholly and solely the problem: but no doubt he would wake up by-and-by.

Suddenly she asked him whether he and his wife had quarrelled. He shook his head that apparently, in spite of its stupidity, she must still love.

"No--oh no."

"Well----"

And on he went again, still quite a number of leagues behind--the complication of his former engagement to Kitty, Evie's sense of unexplained things, Miriam Levey, her voracious curiosity, her presence at this new Consolidation.

But here she interrupted him. "One moment. When do you start--this Consolidation?"

He was toying with a knife; the little reflection pa.s.sed over his ma.s.sive face as he turned the blade. "In a few weeks. Why?"

"You don't intend to take Miriam Levey over with you?"

He put the knife down with a little slap. "I do not," he said. Louie had thought as much. So, no doubt, in spite of what she seemed to have said to Kitty, had Miriam Levey.

"Well, go on; I interrupted you," she said.

He went on. It seemed to her that if nothing had actually happened his overcarefulness was the one way likely to bring it to pa.s.s. Then, she supposed, he would ring her up on the telephone again.

By this time she was thinking far more of Miriam Levey's empty chair at the new Consolidation than she was of things unaccounted for between her guest and his wife.

And as for those unexplained things (Louie neither knew nor cared what they might be), she could only tell him now what she had told him that night when they had walked together, that wives must either be wives or not, must be told things or else be something less than wives.

Perhaps she had not put it quite so plainly to him as that before, but that was what it had amounted to. Men with secrets ought to marry the right women.... She stole a daring look at him across the table.

He was mumbling and twiddling a spoon now. His shoulders, bigger than Buck's, were clothed in an exquisite iron-grey cloth; she wondered whether he knew that she had kissed one of them that night in a Chelsea doorway.... And then, as he paused and looked up, she spoke.

She did so almost curtly. If not telling hadn't answered, she said, she could only suggest, once more, telling. As for Kitty, he might put her entirely on one side; as long as she remained with Louie, Louie would answer for her.

Then, for the first time, he seemed to show a gleam of interest in her affairs. He asked her how she got her living, now.... Her pulse quickened. Billy had told him, then; by "now" he meant now that she no longer sat; and his eyes avoided hers. He coloured; apparently he thought he was doing her an honour in wiping out all memory of that discovery in Billy's studio. An honour! She could have laughed at him.

He little knew how she longed to tell him more--to tell him about the oyster-grey too--to tell him that for her it was as long ago as that.

But no, he had seen the pearl----

And it appeared that his talk really had an object now; but, as usual, she had seen the drift of it before he had. He was thinking of Miss Levey's place, if his absurd delicacies would only allow him to get it out.

"Would you accept it?" he managed at last to ask, sounding her earnestly with his eyes.

"Steady, silly woman," she whispered to herself, brightly flushing....

But, glancing at him, she suddenly winced. Twice before men had offered her posts, at more than their market value, and there had been no colour in her cheeks as she had refused them; had she coloured now at the quick thought that if _he_ had made such an offer she might perhaps...? If so, there was mortification and despite in her colour.

Why did he offer her Miss Levey's place? Was it his wife again--always his ninny of a wife? If that was so, so much the worse for him; it was time he learned that if he got into a mess he must make shift to get out of it again. There was a new little tw.a.n.g in her voice as, suddenly looking into his eyes, she said: "You've no right to expect that of me!"

And as soon as the words were spoken, she saw too where she herself stood, and to what point beyond she was prepared to go. She knew now that she would have taken his job, not at added wages, but without wages at all. But to the humiliating thought that he imagined himself to be doing her a kindness was now superadded that of his entire ignorance that she might be making an attack upon his faithfulness at all. Suddenly she saw herself merely wonderful to him--_she_ wonderful!--she, who had thought she could spend all her life up in the clouds, be content to be magnanimous for magnanimity's sake, virtuous for the mere love of virtue! Oh, if that was all, he needn't think _that_ any longer! Wonderful?... What she wanted was not wonderful at all, oh dear, no: merely something common, coa.r.s.e, filling; nothing more wonderful than that.... Wise mother, to have known that that was the end of it all, and to have taken, long ago, in Henson's studio, the short cut! She did not even try to check a wild little exclamation....

And he evidently saw something too, though what, as he blundered deeper, she did not stop to inquire. He gave a groan. "Poor woman!" he said compa.s.sionately.

He might just as well have set a spark to a fuse. There broke from her a peremptory cry.

"Not that, Jim--that's the one thing I will _not_ bear--I will _not_ be called 'poor woman'----"

And the rest now had to follow. It was the sum of her broodings, resentments, hatreds, dreams, desire, despair. Evie, him, herself--oh, it was not her fault if he didn't see now how the three of them stood.

He knew only too well what he wanted: what Louie wanted she also knew only too well. Except to offer her a job that would save him even the trouble of ringing her up on the telephone when her help was required, had he ever, until this moment, looked at the thing from her point of view? He had not. She would help him still; but if their ships must part like this, at least no false tidings should pa.s.s from bridge to bridge: he should know exactly what it was he asked, and why she gave it! She began to speak rapidly, uncertainly, but sparing him nothing.

Perhaps, after all, she said, his wife would understand; he had only to tell her that her husband made away with her sweetheart; perhaps she could bear it; if she couldn't well--he knew what was his for the holding up of a finger....

Then, as suddenly as she had begun, she stopped. Her voice dropped.

"I've had no luck," she said, with quiet bitterness. "I'm out of it, and there's no more to say. Give me a match."

And then she rose. He might sit there if he liked.

He rose too, and they walked down the room in silence together. The bead screen of the hall parted and tinkled together again behind the great church-door of his back. Without a word he took down his coat and, under the coloured hall lamp, hoisted himself into it. And then he looked at her.

Already in her heart she knew that that look was the end. Her offer had been rejected. Whatever else might happen, she, Louie Causton, would never come between him and his wife. The woman who had those eyes would keep their looks; had it been Louie's fortune to have them, she would have kept their looks. He was a plotter, but not of amours; a carrier through too, but not of intrigues. So grave an innocence was his that probably he didn't know that his look told her all this; if so, it was final indeed.

So she took her dismissal, and then, with her hand on the letter-box of the door, stood gazing meditatively on the ground. She had wanted to be wooed; failing that, she had once more brought herself to woo; and this Joseph had gravely repelled her.

At last she looked up.

"About what you were saying--I mean that place of Miss Levey's," she said. "I don't think it would do--not now."

The man who could plan a murder but not an affair looked humbly up.

"Why not?" he murmured. It was as if he said: "I don't remember that meetings of ours in Billy's studio; I forget this too. You see how it is. Your taking the job would make no difference."

Slowly she shook her head. "I should be seeing you," she said. "It wouldn't do. Good-night."

She saw that she had missed even more than she had imagined.

And yet, before Christmas came, she was at that self-same Consolidation. In October a lofty refusal; in December a creeping back again with her tail between her legs. Where, she asked herself, was her pride now?

The answer was that that had been in October, and this was December.

When she told Kitty that she was succeeding to Miss Levey's place Kitty had certain things to say about treachery and broken friendships. She said them at some length, and then remarked that after that of course Louie could hardly expect her to stay with her.

"You never liked her," she said, as if not to like Miss Levey was an offence in itself. "And I know you tried to keep me from seeing her.

Oh, you think I don't notice things, but you never made a greater mistake; I could tell you things that would surprise you! You and James Jeffries have got some game on; don't tell me he didn't give her the push; Evie and Miriam both say so; oh, you're a deep one, Louie Causton! First you come between me and Miriam; and then that day your father came and I was asking him about black eyes and he told me you could have one _without_ having one till you came to blow your nose--oh, _I_ watched you! And then to go worming about till you got Miriam fired and then bag her job yourself! Thank goodness, some people have better ideas of friendship than that! I have, for one.

Never mind the bit you owe me; you can pay Carter Paterson with it and we'll call it quits. Perhaps it wouldn't be troubling you too much to ask you if you knew where the luggage labels are?"

So Louie let her go. The tract she received by post on the following day: "G.o.d's Eye Everywhere, or No Sins Secret," she dropped into the fire. Even if Kitty really was groping blindfold on the track of that stale old private execution, Archie Merridew didn't matter now. The question had already entered the stage of blank fatality.