The accents were very clear, the face was delicately smiling, the little gestures had a quite tranquil quality.  Rosamund did not seem to care whether Miss Nickall obeyed the summons or not.  She did not seem to care about anything whatever except her own manner of existing.  She was the centre of Paris, and Paris was naught but a circumference for her.  All phenomena beyond the individuality of the woman were reduced to the irrelevant and the negligible.  It would have been absurd to mention to her costume balls.  The frost of her indifference would have wilted them into nothingness.

“Yes, of course, I shall go,” Nick answered.

“When?” was the implacable question.

“Oh!  By the first train,” said Nick eagerly.  As she approached the lamp, the gleam of the devotee could be seen in her gaze.  In one moment she had sacrificed Paris and art and Tommy and herself, and had risen to the sacred ardour of a vocation.  Rosamund was well accustomed to watching the process, and she gave not the least sign of satisfaction or approval.

“I ought to tell you,” she went on, “that I came over from London suddenly by the afternoon service in order to escape arrest.  I am now a political refugee.  Things have come to this pass.  You will do well to leave by the first train.  That is why I decided to call here before going to bed.”

“Where’s Tommy?” asked Nick, appealing wildly to Miss Ingate and Audrey.  Upon being answered she said, still more wildly:  “I must see her.  Can you—­No, I’ll run down myself.”  In the doorway she turned round:  “Mrs. Moncreiff, would you and Miss Ingate like to have my studio while I’m away?  I should just love you to.  There’s a very nice bed over there behind the screen, and a fair sort of couch over here.  Do say you will! Do!”

“Oh!  We will!” Miss Ingate replied at once, reassuringly, as though in haste to grant the supreme request of some condemned victim.  And indeed Miss Nickall appeared ready to burst into tears if she should be thwarted.

As soon as Nick had gone, Miss Ingate’s smiling face, nervous, intimidated, audacious, sardonic, and good humoured, moved out of the gloom nearer to Rosamund.

“You knew I played the barrel organ all down Regent Street?” she ventured, blushing.

“Ah!” murmured Rosamund, unmoved.  “It was you who played the barrel-organ?  So it was.”

“Yes,” said Miss Ingate.  “But I’m like you.  I don’t care passionately for prison.  Eh!  Eh!  I’m not so vehy, vehy fond of it.  I don’t know Miss Burke, but what a pity she has got six weeks, isn’t it?  Still, I was vehy much struck by what someone said to me to-day—­that you’d be vehy sorry if women did get the vote.  I think I should be sorry, too—­you know what I mean.”

“Perfectly,” ejaculated Rosamund, with a pleasant smile.

“I hope I’m not skidding,” said Miss Ingate still more timidly, but also with a sardonic giggle, looking round into the gloom.  “I do skid sometimes, you know, and we’ve just come away from a——­”