“Parnasse Contemporain” that he had picked up for sixpence in Liverpool, and thence to the Midland’s proposal to drive a tunnel under the Knype Canal so as to link up the main-line with the Critchworth and Suddleford loop-line.  Jos was too amazed to put in a word.  Jos sat merely gaping—­a gape that merged by imperceptible degrees into a grin.  Presently he ceased to watch his guest.  He sat watching his sister.

Not once did Albert himself glance in her direction.  She was just a dim silhouette on the outskirts of his vision.  But there she was, unmoving, and he could feel the fixture of her unseen eyes.  The time was at hand when he would have to meet those eyes.  Would he flinch?  Was he master of himself?

The last scrut was powder.  No temporising!  He jerked his glass to his mouth.  A moment later, holding out his plate to her, he looked Emily full in the eyes.  They were Emily’s eyes, but not hers alone.  They were collective eyes—­that was it!  They were the eyes of stark, staring womanhood.  Her face had been dead white, but now suddenly up from her throat, over her cheeks, through the down between her eyebrows, went a rush of colour, up over her temples, through the very parting of her hair.

“Happen,” he said without a quaver in his voice, “I’ll have a bit more, like.”

She flung her arms forward on the table and buried her face in them.  It was a gesture wild and meek.  It was the gesture foreseen and yet incredible.  It was recondite, inexplicable, and yet obvious.  It was the only thing to be done—­and yet, by gum, she had done it.

Her brother had risen from his seat and was now at the door.  “Think I’ll step round to the Works,” he said, “and see if they banked up that furnace aright.”

    NOTE.—­The author has in preparation a series of volumes
    dealing with the life of Albert and Emily Grapp.

ENDEAVOUR

By

J*HN G*LSW*RTHY

The dawn of Christmas Day found London laid out in a shroud of snow.  Like a body wasted by diseases that had triumphed over it at last, London lay stark and still now, beneath a sky that was as the closed leaden shell of a coffin.  It was what is called an old-fashioned Christmas.

Nothing seemed to be moving except the Thames, whose embanked waters flowed on sullenly in their eternal act of escape to the sea.  All along the wan stretch of Cheyne Walk the thin trees stood exanimate, with not a breath of wind to stir the snow that pied their soot-blackened branches.  Here and there on the muffled ground lay a sparrow that had been frozen in the night, its little claws sticking up heavenward.  But here and there also those tinier adventurers of the London air, smuts, floated vaguely and came to rest on the snow—­signs that in the seeming death of civilisation some housemaids at least survived, and some fires had been lit.