‘Don’t cry so.  What does he say?’

Nelly did not answer for a little.  At last she said, her face still buried—­

‘It was only—­to tell me—­that he loved me—­’

There was silence again.  Then Nelly rose to her feet.  She pressed her hair back from her white face.

‘I don’t want any supper, Bridget.  I think—­I should like to go to bed.’

Bridget helped her to undress.  It was now nearly dark and she drew down the blinds.  When she looked again at Nelly, she saw her lying white and still, her wide eyes fixed on vacancy.

‘I found a visitor downstairs,’ she said, abruptly.  ’It was Sir William Farrell.’

Nelly shewed no surprise, or interest.  But she seemed to find some words mechanically.

‘Why did he come?’

Bridget came to the bedside.

’He wants us to go and stay at his flat—­their flat.  He and his sister have it together—­in St. James’ Square.  He wants us to go to-morrow.  He’s going back to Carton.  There are two servants there.  We shouldn’t have any trouble.  And you’d be close to D——­ Street.  Any news they got they could send round directly.’

Nelly closed her eyes.

‘I don’t care where we go,’ she said, under her breath.

‘He wanted a line to-night,’ said Bridget—­’I can’t hear of any lodgings.  And the boarding-houses are all getting frightfully expensive—­because food’s going up so.’

‘Not a boarding-house!’ murmured Nelly.  A shiver of repulsion ran through her.  She was thinking of a boarding-house in one of the Bloomsbury streets where she and Bridget had once stayed before her marriage—­the long tables full of strange faces—­the drawing-room crowded with middle-aged women, who stared so.

’Well, I can write to him to-night then, and say we’ll go to-morrow?  We certainly can’t stay here.  The charges are abominable.  If we go to their flat, for a few days, we can look round us and find something cheap.’

‘Where is it?’ said Nelly faintly.

‘In St. James’ Square.’

The address conveyed very little to Nelly.  She knew hardly anything of London.  Two visits—­one to some cousins in West Kensington, another to a friend at Hampstead—­together with the fortnight three years ago in the Bloomsbury boarding-house, when Bridget had had some grand scheme with a publisher which never came off, and Nelly had mostly stayed indoors with bad toothache:—­her acquaintance with the great city had gone no further.  Of its fashionable quarters both she and Bridget were entirely ignorant, though Bridget would not have admitted it.

Bridget got her writing-case out of her trunk and began to write to Sir William.  Nelly watched her.  At last she said slowly, as though she were becoming a little more conscious of the world around her:—­

‘It’s awfully kind of them.  But we needn’t stay long.’

‘Oh no, we needn’t stay long.’