‘By the way, Nora,’ he burst out with sudden bright animation, ’I’ve been so occupied to-day I forgot to wish you many happy returns.  And here’s the usual.  I hadn’t got it on me this morning.’

He kissed her and gave her a ten-pound note.

‘Oh! thanks, Jack!’ she said, glancing at the note with a factitious curiosity to hide her embarrassment.

‘You’re good-looking enough yet!’ he exclaimed as he gazed at her.

‘He wants something out of me.  He wants something out of me,’ she thought as she gave him a smile for his compliment.  And this idea that he wanted something, that circumstances should have forced him into the position of an applicant, distressed her.  She grieved for him.  She saw all his good qualities—­his energy, vitality, cleverness, facile kindliness, his large masculinity.  It seemed to her, as she gazed up at him from the music-stool in the shaded solitude or the drawing-room, that she was very intimate with him, and very dependent on him; and she wished him to be always flamboyant, imposing, and successful.

‘If you are at all hard up, Jack——­’ She made as if to reject the note.

‘Oh! get out!’ he laughed.  ’It’s not a tenner that I’m short of.  I tell you what you can do,’ he went on quickly and lightly.  ’I was thinking of raising a bit temporarily on this house.  Five hundred, say.  You wouldn’t mind, would you?’

The house was her own property, inherited from an aunt.  John’s suggestion came as a shock to her.  To mortgage her house:  this was what he wanted!

‘Oh yes, certainly, if you like,’ she acquiesced quietly.  ’But I thought—­I thought business was so good just now, and——­’

‘So it is,’ he stopped her with a hint of annoyance.  ’I’m short of capital.  Always have been.’

‘I see,’ she said, not seeing.  ‘Well, do what you like.’

‘Right, my girl.  Now—­roost!’ He extinguished the gas over the mantelpiece.

The familiar vulgarity of some of his phrases always vexed her, and ‘roost’ was one of these phrases.  In a flash he fell from a creature engagingly masculine to the use-worn daily sharer of her monotonous existence.

‘Have you heard about Arthur Twemlow coming over?’ she demanded, half vindictively, as he was preparing to blow out the last candle on the piano.  He stopped.

‘Who’s Arthur Twemlow?’

‘Mr. Twemlow’s son, of course,’ she said.  ‘From America.’

’Oh!  Him!  Coming over, did you say?  I wonder what he looks like.  Who told you?’

’Uncle Meshach.  And he said I was to say you were to look out for yourself when Arthur Twemlow came.  I don’t know what he meant.  One of his jokes, I expect.’  She tried to laugh.

John looked at her, and then looked away, and immediately blew out the last candle.  But she had seen him turn pale at what Uncle Meshach had said.  Or was that pallor merely the effect on his face of raising the coloured candle-shade as he extinguished the candle?  She could not be sure.