They drove into the courtyard of the select and austere establishment where John Stanway had brought his wife on her wedding journey.  Leonora found that it had scarcely changed; the dark entrance lounge presented the same appearance now as it had done more than twenty years ago; it had the same air of receiving visitors with condescension; the whole street was the same.  She grew thoughtful; and Harry’s witticisms, as he ceremoniously superintended their induction into the place, served only to deepen the shadow in her heart.

‘Any letters for me?’ she asked the hall porter, loitering behind while Millicent and Harry went into the salle a manger.

‘What name, madam?  No, madam.’

But during luncheon, to which Harry stayed, a flunkey approached bearing a telegram on silver.  ‘In a moment,’ she thought, ’I shall know when we are to meet.’  And she trembled with apprehension.  The flunkey, however, gave the telegram to Millicent, who accepted it as though she had been accepting telegrams at the hands of flunkeys all her life.

‘Miss Stanway,’ she smiled superiorly with her chin forward, perceiving the look on Leonora’s face.  She tore the envelope.  ’Lewis says I am to go to-day at four, instead of to-morrow.  Hooray! the sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep, though the harbour bar be mo—­oaning.  Ma, that’s the very time you have to meet Rose at the hospital.  Harry, you shall take me.’

Leonora would have preferred that Harry and Millicent should not go alone together to see Mr. Louis Lewis.  But she could not bring herself to break the appointment with Rose, who was extremely sensitive; nor could she well inform Harry, at this stage of his close intimacy with the family, that she no longer cared to entrust Milly to his charge.

She left the hotel before the other two, because she had further to drive.  The hansom had scarcely got into the street when she instructed the driver to return.

‘Of course you will settle nothing definitely with Mr. Lewis,’ she said to Milly.  ‘Tell him I wish to see him first.’

‘Oh, mother!’ the girl cried, pouting.

* * * * *

At the New Female and Maternity Hospital in Lamb’s Conduit Street Leonora was shown to a bench in the central hall and requested to sit down.  The clock over the first landing of the double staircase indicated three minutes to four.  During the drive she had begun by expecting to meet Arthur on his way to the hotel, and even in Piccadilly, where delays of traffic had forced upon her attention the glittering opulence and afternoon splendour of the London season, she had still thought of him and of the interview which was to pass between them.  But here she was obsessed by her immediate environment.  The approach to the hospital, through sombre squalid streets, past narrow courts in which innumerable children tumbled and yelled, disturbed and desolated her.  It appeared