"But--the little chap----" Roy said presently, with a gulp. "Will you tell a fellow how you manage?"

That Louie did not mind doing, more or less. "And now I must go back,"

she said, rising.

"I'll walk back a bit of the way with you. I'm not going to let you go like this."

At the little drinking-fountain she stopped. "Don't make it harder,"

she said. He had been indicating the rabble of children.

"But look at 'em, poor little beggars!" he said. "Dash it all, I'm not just blowing off--I _could_ do such lots for him--he could ride--and shoot--and fish--and I've a corking little pony at gra.s.s now." He mentioned these things one after the other, slowly, as they occurred to him.

Louie groaned inwardly, but aloud she said: "Please don't come any farther. Good-bye."

"But I may come again? You see, I jolly well know I could persuade you."

"N-o----"

"I shall, though--you bet," Roy announced.

She left him, wondering whether it would have made any difference at all had he, in asking her to marry him, told her once, even once, that he loved her.

But she did not return home. Instead, she walked past the block of flats, crossed Putney Bridge, and sought her old Nursing Home in Mortlake Road. As a drunkard might pant for a drink, so now in her extremity she wanted to hear gaiety and laughter and talk. Though she paid for it in prostration afterwards, she felt that without some such intermission she could never get through the night. And to-morrow was that dead day, Sunday. Further than that she did not see; beyond the anodyne of an ordinary human laugh she did not inquire. It seemed to her a matter of the last moment to herself that Miss Dot and Miss Cora should be at home; if they were not, she felt that she must walk straight into a public-house, as a man might, and get herself something to drink.

But Miss Cora and Miss Dot were at home; they had just come in from a matinee. They made an onslaught on Louie. Had she seen the piece? Oh, the funniest thing! They really had had some luck at the theatre at last! The last time it had been a slum piece, all heartstrings and gutter-snipes; and the time before that--would Louie believe it!--just when they had expected to see frocks and dancing and suchlike, the curtain had gone up on a dentist's parlour! Two half-crowns for seats in the pit for that! It was almost like paying money to go and see another Nursing Home!

"But give the poor girl some tea--what are we thinking of!" said Miss Cora.

"No, thanks--I've given two people tea this afternoon already," said Louie. "Tell me about the play."

And, both speaking at once, they told her about the play--_such_ a frock as Ellaline Terriss had worn!--an e-_nor_-mous pink hat, pink like a rabbit's ear, and a frock, chiffon over pink satin.

Ah! That was better!

"But where's my bonnie boy?" Miss Cora demanded.

"Oh, let's show her the new one, the little Crowley baby!"

The little Crowley baby was brought in....

"May I invite myself to supper?" Louie asked by-and-by.

"Oh, do stop!"

"Then give me some stout or something. I'm not sleeping very well."

"Oh, we'll see that's all right----"

And when, at ten o'clock, Louie left, it was with a sleeping preparation in her pocket. She took it in bed. It did its work. Half Sunday had pa.s.sed when next she awoke.

On the Sunday afternoon she went with Jimmy and Rhoda to Bishops Park; then, packing them off home, she crossed the bridge again and took the bus to Buck's. At Buck's she again stayed until ten, and she smiled as, on the way home again, she remembered the little party to which Chaff had once taken her, pigtail and all. If Chaff had had a little party that night she would have invited herself to it; it would have been something to do. Although it was half-past eleven when she reached her own door she was not in the least tired; had she not slept until well after midday? She walked back to Putney Bridge again. There a man spoke to her. She wondered what he would have said had she stopped; it would have been amusing to know. She felt that she had not had enough amus.e.m.e.nt. She wished she could have gone back to the Business School in Holborn again. That had been amusing. Mr. Mackie had been very amusing. One of his songs, he had said, that about the Gorgonzola Cheese, never failed to create merriment.

She hummed as much as she could remember of the air of it as she walked, and took two more of Miss Cora's sleeping-tablets before going to bed.

She found, too, an entirely unexpected amount of amus.e.m.e.nt at the Consolidation on the Monday morning. Not that everything was not much as usual; the routine was the same; but a quite comic spirit seemed to pervade the whole place. Lacking a Mr. Mackie, Sir Julius, dapper and perfect in his aplomb, who had thought of asking her to be his mistress but had found a more profitable use to put her to, seemed somehow as funny as needs be; she wondered she had not noticed it before. It happened that Mr. Stonor had to rebuke one of the telephone girls that morning; there was diversion in the way in which the girl tossed her dolly-capped head and told him that she would talk to her "boys" if she liked. Quite right; that was the way to take things, as a joke. And Mr. Whitlock was portentously funny over a nought or so that had strayed into a pile of figures; and the glazed screen that marked Louie's superiority to the other girls in the same room seemed inanimately funny, and Jim himself was funny, when you came to think of it, sitting invisible there in his room with people coming and going all the time, as if the earth would have ceased to revolve on her axis or the sun have omitted to rise if Jim had not rung bells and jotted his initials on his bits of paper. And funnier than everything else was the fact that Louie should be there at all. She laughed outright when, at nine o'clock that night (she had been kept on account of some urgent joke or other), she stepped from the upholstered lift and out into Pall Mall.

Again she wished that Chaff had had a little party somewhere. Jim, she understood from Mr. Stonor, was giving a party presently, not a little one, but a large, probably a screamingly funny, one. But its humour would probably be lost on Jim. Jim did not always see jokes; that was where Jim had made the mistake; he needed somebody to point them out to him. His wife, being part of the comedy herself, naturally could not do so; she cried when she should have laughed; she had no "kick,"

no "buck," in her. It was a pity, for Jim needed these things, and ought to have married a woman who had them. Well, it was rather late, but not too late for Louie to go into a shilling gallery somewhere.

To-morrow, if she could get away early, she would go up to Camden Town and see Billy. Billy was a joke too, spending whole, real days in making artificial coloured shapes on canvases or solemnly scratching his copper plates. One of the best things Billy had ever done a woman had humorously kicked aside with her foot. That showed what these things were worth in the big, big world. Of course a sense of humour was really a sense of proportion. The dreadful lack of it showed when people magnified trifles so. Yes, she would go and see Billy to-morrow. To-night, the theatre gallery.

She found Billy on the following evening, still etching, the humorous fellow, but amusingly grave too. Perhaps he had heard, or guessed, something from Roy. He was dissolving the ground from a plate; Louie wondered what the curiously sweet-smelling fluid he was using was; and then she remembered. She had smelt that same smell when Jimmy had been born--which event also, by the way, had been the consequence of a lark. She remembered, too, the wonderful, releasing sleep that heavy-smelling stuff had given her. It might be rather a useful thing to know where to find that stuff; it was necessary to Louie's enjoyment of the world and its humour that she should sleep at night.

It struck her as a very happy chance that chloroform should be used in the practice of etching. She admitted that it was rather a shame to steal from Billy again, but she felt that she now needed that wonderful, releasing sleep even more than when Jimmy had been born.

An hour later she left Billy's with the ribbed blue bottle in her pocket.

The remainder of the week also was gay; so was the next week, though perhaps with a slightly diminishing gaiety. But the level was restored again when Roy once more turned up at her flat, again on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon. Really she could have laughed, as they say, fit to split.

Roy, who seemed to think that you could ask a woman to marry you without the--formality, call it--of telling her you loved her! It was not for Louie to spoil the sport by pointing out the inessential omission. Not that she hesitated at all now; she had only to think of how it might have read in the paper: "At Saint So-and-So's, on such and such a date, by a Reverend Statue, a.s.sisted by another Reverend Effigy, a Tanagra Figure, to a trodden-on Painting by Billy Izzard,"

etc., etc. Oh no. That wasn't loving----

There was no doubt that Roy loved Jimmy, however; and that was perhaps a little more serious. He had handed in his papers; he could provide for Jimmy; there was riding, and shooting, and fishing, and the corking little pony; but ... it was impossible, of course. Jimmy was Louie's and n.o.body else's. If Jimmy must play on Sat.u.r.day afternoons with the rabble on Eelbrook Common, well, he must; Louie would do all for him that she could. It was a pity--especially about the pony. It disturbed Louie a little. It disturbed her, in fact, so much that that night she remembered something she had forgotten about for ten days and more--the blue ribbed bottle she had stolen from Billy. But as she had left it in her drawer at the Consolidation she had to sleep as best she could without it. Perhaps it was just as well. It was not a good habit. She wondered whether Billy had missed the bottle; she would go up again and see, taking that old painting with her. That would square accounts a little. Certainly it was a shame to loot Billy like that.

She went up to Billy's with the study. Billy received it absently. And she was glad that Billy had a code, for he was grave again, and seemed all but on the point of talking seriously to her, code or none. But it blew over. He asked her whether she'd noticed him with a bottle of chloroform one night; he'd lost one; stupid thing to be careless about; must be somewhere; had Louie seen him with it, cleaning a plate?----

"No," said Louie.

"Well, it may turn up. Thanks for the canvas. To tell you the truth I rather wanted it. Merely as painting it's--_knuk_!" Billy made a delectable little foreign gesture.

"I'm no judge of things as painting," said Louie. "And--I say--Billy----"

"What?"

"I don't know that I haven't changed my mind about not sitting--if you asked me very nicely----"

But Billy looked gravely at her again. "Oh, it doesn't matter. I'd rather you didn't. I think I can manage. You'd do far better----"

He looked hard at her, but the code held.

"To do what?" said Louie.

"Well, not to sit," said Billy, turning away.

Louie felt ridiculously touched; nevertheless, much as she liked his loyalty, she wasn't going to talk about Roy. "Thanks, Bill," she said simply. "You're a good sort." And there the matter dropped. Neither for Billy nor for anybody else did she ever sit again.

It seemed strange that so slight a thing as an indisposition of Mr.

Stonor should obscure the mock-sun of Louie's gaiety as if a vapour had crept across it; but so it was. Occasionally urgent messages were taken to Iddesleigh Gate at night; usually Mr. Stonor took them; but one day Mr. Stonor left at lunch-time and did not come back that day.

Sir Julius himself, who had had dinner sent in that night from a restaurant, sent for Louie and gave her certain papers and instructions. As soon as she learned the errand she asked whether n.o.body else could go instead. She invented an improbable engagement.

"I'm sorry," Sir Julius said, "but I want Whitlock--I shall have to wait here myself till you come back. If you could go, and give them to Mr. Jeffries himself--n.o.body else----" That was as near as Sir Julius ever came to a direct command.