“Higgins has gone,” he said.  “He slipped off an hour ago.  We’ll have to manage to-night somehow.  Now will you be a good child?”

“I’ll go back,” she promised meekly.  “I’m sorry I’m not forty.”

He turned her round and started her in the right direction with a little push.  But she had gone only a step or two when she heard him coming after her quickly.

“Where are you?”

“Here,” quavered Jane, not quite sure of him or of herself perhaps.

But when he stopped beside her he didn’t try to touch her arm again.  He only said: 

“I wouldn’t have you forty for anything in the world.  I want you to be just as you are, very beautiful and young.”

Then, as if he was afraid he would say too much, he turned on his heel, and a moment after he kicked against the fallen pitcher in the darkness and awoke a thousand echoes.  As for Jane, she put her fingers to her ears and ran to her room, where she slammed the door and crawled into bed with burning cheeks.

Jane was never sure whether it was five minutes later or five seconds when somebody in the room spoke—­from a chair by the window.

“Do you think,” said a mild voice—­“do you think you could find me some bread and butter?  Or a glass of milk?”

Jane sat up in bed suddenly.  She knew at once that she had made a mistake, but she was quite dignified about it.  She looked over at the chair, and the convalescent typhoid was sitting in it, wrapped in a blanket and looking wan and ghostly in the dusk.

“I’m afraid I’m in the wrong room,” Jane said very stiffly, trying to get out of the bed with dignity, which is difficult.  “The hall is dark and all the doors look so alike——­”

She made for the door at that and got out into the hall with her heart going a thousand a minute again.

“You’ve forgotten your slippers,” called the convalescent typhoid after her.  But nothing would have taken Jane back.

The convalescent typhoid took the slippers home later and locked them away in an inner drawer, where he kept one or two things like faded roses, and old gloves, and a silk necktie that a girl had made him at college—­things that are all the secrets a man keeps from his wife and that belong in that small corner of his heart which also he keeps from his wife.  But that has nothing to do with Jane.

Jane went back to her own bed thoroughly demoralised.  And sleep being pretty well banished by that time, she sat up in bed and thought things over.  Before this she had not thought much, only raged and sulked alternately.  But now she thought.  She thought about the man in the room down the hall with the lines of dissipation on his face.  And she thought a great deal about what a silly she had been, and that it was not too late yet, she being not forty and “beautiful.”  It must be confessed that she thought a great deal about that.  Also she reflected that what she deserved was to marry some person with even a worse temper than hers, who would bully her at times and generally keep her straight.  And from that, of course, it was only a step to the fact that red-haired people are proverbially bad-tempered!