“I couldn’t sleep last night for thinking of that poor Christina Coles,” she said, “the char-woman told me yesterday that the child had been obliged to go out and pawn some of her things in order to get the money to pay her room rent.”

With a start his mind swung back from the dream life to the actual.  He had not seen Christina for more than a week, and the thought of her pierced his heart with a keen reproach.

“Good God, has it come to that?” he exclaimed.

“What hurts me most is not being able to do anything to help her,” resumed Mrs. Trent, “she’s so proud that I don’t dare even ask her to a meal for fear she’ll take offence.”

“But if it’s so bad as that why doesn’t she go home—­she must have a home.”

“Oh, she has—­but to go back, she feels, would mean that she’s given up, and the char-woman declares that she’ll never give up so long as she’s alive.”

“Well, she’s a precious little fool,” observed Trent, as he drank an extra glass of claret.

But the thought of Christina was not to be so lightly put from him, and before the afternoon was over he went up to the eighth landing and knocked in vain at her door.  She was still out, as the little pile of rejected manuscript lying on her threshold bore witness; and he turned away and came down again with a disappointment of which he felt himself to be half ashamed.  An hour later he ran against her when he was going out into the street, and as she turned with her constrained little bow and looked at him for an instant with her sincere blue eyes, he was almost overcome by the rush of pity which the sight of her evoked.  How pale and thin she had grown! how shabby her little tan coat looked in the daylight; and yet what a charming curve there was to her brown head!  He realised then for the first time that brown—­warm, living brown with glints of amber—­was the one colour for a woman’s hair.

The next morning he rushed off indignantly to upbraid Adams.

“The girl’s starving, I tell you—­we can’t let her starve,” he exclaimed in an agony of remorse.

“Oh, yes we can,” returned Adams with a cheerful brutality which enraged the younger man.  “Starving isn’t half so bad as writing trash.  But you needn’t look at me like that,” he added, “she doesn’t come here any longer now.  She told me fiction was the field she meant to dig in.”

“Well, you’ll kill her among you,” was Trent’s threatening rejoinder; and filled with a righteous fury against literature he went back again to knock at the door of Christina’s empty room.  Once his mother came up also, but the girl, it appeared, was always out now, while the rejected manuscript thickened each morning upon the threshold.  Several times Mrs. Trent arranged a little tray of luncheon and sent it up stairs by the old negro servant, but the message brought back was always that Christina was not at home.  And then gradually, as the weeks went by, the dignity and the pathos of her struggle were surrounded in Trent’s mind by a romantic halo.  Her beauty borrowed from his poetic fancy the peculiar touch of atmosphere it lacked, and his thoughts dwelt more and more upon her slender, girlish figure, her smooth brown hair, and the flower-like sweetness of her face.