The shadow of Chaffery and his deceptions lay indeed across all these things, sometimes faint, sometimes dark and present.  Then Lewisham became insistent, his sentimental memories ceased, and he asked questions that verged on gulfs of doubt.  Had she ever “helped”?  She had not, she declared.  Then she added that twice at home she had “sat down” to complete the circle.  She would never help again.  That she promised—­if it needed promising.  There had already been dreadful trouble at home about the exposure at Lagune’s.  Her mother had sided with her stepfather and joined in blaming her.  But was she to blame?

“Of course you were not to blame,” said Lewisham.  Lagune, he learnt, had been unhappy and restless for the three days after the seance—­indulging in wearisome monologue—­with Ethel as sole auditor (at twenty-one shillings a week).  Then he had decided to give Chaffery a sound lecture on his disastrous dishonesty.  But it was Chaffery gave the lecture.  Smithers, had he only known it, had been overthrown by a better brain than Lagune’s, albeit it spoke through Lagune’s treble.

Ethel did not like talking of Chaffery and these other things.  “If you knew how sweet it was to forget it all,” she would say; “to be just us two together for a little while.”  And, “What good does it do to keep on?” when Lewisham was pressing.  Lewisham wanted very much to keep on at times, but the good of it was a little hard to demonstrate.  So his knowledge of the situation remained imperfect and the weeks drifted by.

Wonderfully varied were those seven-and-sixty nights, as he came to remember in after life.  There were nights of damp and drizzle, and then thick fogs, beautiful, isolating, grey-white veils, turning every yard of pavement into a private room.  Grand indeed were these fogs, things to rejoice at mightily, since then it was no longer a thing for public scorn when two young people hurried along arm in arm, and one could do a thousand impudent, significant things with varying pressure and the fondling of a little hand (a hand in a greatly mended glove of cheap kid).  Then indeed one seemed to be nearer that elusive something that threaded it all together.  And the dangers of the street corners, the horses looming up suddenly out of the dark, the carters with lanterns at their horses’ heads, the street lamps, blurred, smoky orange at one’s nearest, and vanishing at twenty yards into dim haze, seemed to accentuate the infinite need of protection on the part of a delicate young lady who had already traversed three winters of fogs, thornily alone.  Moreover, one could come right down the quiet street where she lived, halfway to the steps of her house, with a delightful sense of enterprise.