He did not even apologize.

“I suppose I should have come back sooner or later.  But I didn’t have the chance.  My father died that night—­unexpectedly.”  He brushed aside her low interjection.

“Oh, I was jolly glad.  But after that we had to clear out.  There was no money at all.”

“But you lived in a big house.  Your father was a great doctor.”

“I was a great liar,” he retorted impatiently.  “I suppose I wanted to impress you.  Perhaps he was a great doctor.  Anyhow, he never did any work.  There was a bailiff in the house when he died and a pile of bills.  And not much else.”

“What happened, then?  Did you go with your stepmother?  I remember how you hated her!  You wouldn’t admit that she was a mother of any sort.”

“No.  I don’t know what became of her.  I never saw her again after that night.  I think she went to live with her own people.  Christine took care of me.”

“I don’t remember Christine.  I don’t think you ever told me about her.”

“I wouldn’t have known how to explain.  I don’t know now.  She was a sort of friend—­my father’s and mother’s friend.  There was an understanding between her and my mother—­a promise—­I don’t know what.  So she took me away with her.  Not that she had any money, either.  We went to live in two rooms in the suburbs, and she worked for us both.  She had never worked before—­not for money—­and she wasn’t young.  But she did it.”

“A great sort of friend.  And she came through too——?”

He did not answer at once, and he felt her look at him quickly, anxiously, as though she had felt him shrink back into himself.  She heard something in his silence that he did not want her to hear.  He put his head down to the wind again, hiding a white, hard face.

“Oh, yes, and we still live in two rooms—­over a garage in Drayton Mews.  My room ‘folds up’ in the day-time, and she sits there and knits woollen things for the shops.  She has to take life easily now.  She had an illness, and her eyes trouble her.  But she’s better—­much better.  And next year everything will be different.”

The street had run out into the still shadows of a great dim square.  For a moment they hesitated like travellers on the verge of unknown country; then Francey crossed over to the iron-palinged garden and they walked on side by side under the trees that rattled their grimy, fleshless limbs in an eerie dance.  There was no one else stirring.  The eyes of the stately Georgian houses were already closed in the weariness of their sad old age.

But she asked no questions.  She seemed to have drifted away from him on a secret journey of her own.  He had to draw her back—­make her realize——­

“I shall be a doctor then,” he said challengingly.

“You said you would be a doctor.  We quarrelled about it.”

“How you remember things——­”