He did not notice that her large eyes had grown larger and her pale face paler.  In another moment the hall was deserted again.  Mr. Belmont had ascended in the lift, Tom had gone to his rest, and the head night-porter was concealed in the pagoda.  Nina sank down limply on her stool, her nostrils twitching; she feared she was about to faint, but this final calamity did not occur.  She had, nevertheless, experienced the greatest shock of her brief life, and the way of it was thus.

II

Nina Malpas was born amid the embers of one of those fiery conjugal dramas which occur with romantic frequency in the provincial towns of the northern Midlands, where industrial conditions are such as to foster an independent spirit among women of the lower class generally, and where by long tradition ‘character’ is allowed to exploit itself more freely than in the southern parts of our island.  Lemuel Malpas was a dashing young commercial traveller, with what is known as ’an agreeable address,’ in Bursley, one of the Five Towns, Staffordshire.  On the strength of his dash he wooed and married the daughter of an hotel-keeper in the neighbouring town of Hanbridge.  Six months after the wedding—­in other words, at the most dangerous period of the connubial career—­Mrs. Malpas’s father died, and Mrs. Malpas became the absolute mistress of eight thousand pounds.  Lemuel[1] had carefully foreseen this windfall, and wished to use the money in enterprises of the earthenware trade.  Mrs. Malpas, pretty and vivacious, with a self-conceit hardened by the adulation of saloon-bars, very decidedly thought otherwise.  Her motto was, ‘What’s yours is mine, but what’s mine’s my own.’  The difference was accentuated.  Long mutual resistances were followed by reconciliations, which grew more and more transitory, and at length both recognised that the union, not founded on genuine affection, had been a mistake.

  [1] This name is pronounced with the accent on the first syllable in
  the Five Towns.

‘Keep your d——­d brass!’ Lemuel exclaimed one morning, and he went off on a journey and forgot to come back.  A curious letter dated from Liverpool wished his wife happiness, and informed her that, since she was well provided for, he had no scruples about leaving her.  Mrs. Malpas was startled at first, but she soon perceived that what Lemuel had done was exactly what the brilliant and enterprising Lemuel might have been expected to do.  She jerked up her doll’s head, and ejaculated, ’So much the better!’

A few weeks later she sold the furniture and took rooms in Scarborough, where, amid pleasurable surroundings, she determined to lead the joyous life of a grass-widow, free of all cares.  Then, to her astonishment and disgust, Nina was born.  She had not bargained for Nina.  She found herself in the tiresome position of a mother whose explanations of her child lack plausibility.  One lodging-housekeeper to whom she hazarded the statement that Lemuel was in Australia had saucily replied:  ’I thought maybe it was the North Pole he was gone to!’