“It’s odd:  I was thinking of Dick, just now, when you—­when you spoke to me.  The lamp put me in mind of him.  I was wondering what it cost.  We have nothing like it at home.  Of course, if I bought one for the shop, people would talk—­’drawing attention,’ they’d say, after what has happened.  But I thought that Dick, perhaps . . . when he grows up and enters the business . . . perhaps he might propose such a thing, and then I shan’t say no.  I should carry it off lightly . . .  After all, it’s the shop it would call attention to . . . not the house.  And one must advertise in these days.”

She was looking at him steadily now.  “Yes,” she assented, “people would talk.”

“And they pity me.  I do hate to be pitied, in that way.  Even the people up here, at the old lodgings . . .  I won’t come to them again.  If I thought the children . . .  One never can tell how much children know—­”

“Don’t, Willy!”

He plunged a hand into his pocket.  “I daresay, now, you’re starving?”

Her arms began to sway again, and she laughed quietly, hideously.  “Don’t—­don’t—­don’t!  I make money.  That’s the worst.  I make money.  Oh, why don’t you hit me?  Why was you always a soft man?”

For a moment he stood horribly revolted.  But his weakness had a better side, and he showed it now.

“I say, Annie . . . is it so bad?”

“It is hell.”

“’Soft’?” he harked back again.  “It might take some courage to be soft.”

She peered at him eagerly; then sighed.  “But you haven’t that sort of courage, Willy.”

“They would say . . .” he went on musing, “I wonder what they would say? . . .  Come back to the lamp,” he cried with sudden peevishness.  “Don’t look out there . . . this circle of light on the pavement . . . like a map of the world.”

“With only our two shadows on it.”

“If it were all the world . . .”  He peered around, searching the darkness.  “If there were nothing to concern us beyond, and we could stay always inside it . . .”

“—­With the light shining straight down on us, and our shadows close at our feet, and so small!  But directly we moved beyond they would lengthen, lengthen . . .”

“’Forsaking all other’—­that’s what the Service says.  And what does that mean if we cannot stand apart from all and render account to each other only?  I tell you I’ve made allowances.  I didn’t make any in the old days, being wrapped up in the shop and the chapel, and you not caring for either.  There was fault on my side:  I’ve come to see that.”

“I’d liefer you struck me, Willy, instead of making allowances.”

“Oh, come, that’s nonsense.  It seems to me, Annie, there’s nothing we couldn’t help to mend together.  It would never be the same, of course:  but we can understand . . . or at least overlook.”  In his magnanimity he caught at high thoughts.  “This light above us—­what if it were the Truth?”