When she summoned decision to approach them where they stood side by side on the hearthrug, both tall, big, formal, and preoccupied, Twemlow at once said that unfortunately he must go; Stanway made none but the merest perfunctory attempt to detain him.  He thanked Leonora stiffly for her hospitality, and said good-bye with scarcely a smile.  But as John opened the door for him to pass out, he turned to glance at her, and smiled brightly, kindly, bowing a final adieu, to which she responded.  She who never in her life till then had condescended to such a device softly stepped to the unlatched door and listened.

‘This one yours?’ she heard John say, and then the sound of a hat bouncing on the tiled floor.

‘My fault entirely,’ said Twemlow’s voice.  ’By the way, I guess I can see you at your office one day soon?’

‘Yes, certainly,’ John answered with false glib lightness.  ’What about?  Some business?’

‘Well, yes—­business,’ drawled Twemlow.

They walked away towards the outer hall, and she heard no more, except the indistinct murmur of a sudden brief dialogue between the visitor and the two girls, who must have come in from the garden.  Then the front door banged heavily.  He was gone.  The vast and arid tedium of her life closed in upon her again; she seemed to exist in a colourless void peopled only by ominous dim elusive shapes of disaster.

But as involuntarily she clenched her hands the formidable thought swept through her brain that Arthur Twemlow was not so calm, nor so impassive, nor so set apart, but that her spell over him, if she chose to exert it, might be a shield to the devious man her husband.

CHAPTER IV

AN INTIMACY

‘Does father really mean it about me going to the works to-morrow?’ Ethel asked that night.

‘I suppose so, my dear,’ replied Leonora, and she added:  ’You must do all you can to help him.’

Ethel’s clear gift of interpreting even the most delicate modulations in her mother’s voice, instantly gave her the first faint sense of alarm.

‘Why, mamma! what do you mean?’

‘What I say, dear,’ Leonora murmured with neutral calm.  ’You must do all you can to help him.  We look on you as a woman now.’

‘You don’t, you don’t!’ Ethel thought passionately as she went upstairs.  ‘And you never will.  Never!’

The profound instinctive sympathy which existed between her mother and herself was continually being disturbed by the manifest insincerity of that assertion contained in Leonora’s last sentence.  The girl was in arms, without knowing it, against a whole order of things.  She could scarcely speak to Millicent in the bedroom.  She was disgusted with her father, and she was disgusted with Leonora for pretending that her father was sagacious and benevolent, for not admitting that he was merely a trial to be endured.  She