“As a matter of fact, your letter completely puzzled me.  I’m a modest sort of person, you know.  To be asked to help anyone seemed such a wonderful thing to me that I scarcely believed it.  If a man had written the letter I should have believed it more.  But as I told you, I can’t take women seriously—­”

“Before you’ve finished with me you will,” she said, and laughed.

She was just going to suggest to him that he was tired and should go to bed:  she was so anxious to get him out of the way before Louis came out of his corner that she could scarcely talk coherently.  But just at that moment Louis came up to her.  He took no notice of Kraill or Mrs. Twist, who was quite used to him by this time.  At the back of Louis’s mind was the obsession that in two days he would draw his pay; half of him was a blazing hunger for whisky after three weeks’ abstinence and hard work and peace; the other half of him was fighting the desire desperately; he wanted to win over one of these warring halves to the other; the fact that he had been drinking all the evening had weakened the finer half; his brain worked quickly.  If he could find some grievance against Marcella he would be able to excuse himself to himself for getting drunk, for taking the money that he knew she needed.  He wanted peace—­unity within.  So he raved at her because the tag had come off his shoelace, and it was her wifely duty to see that a new lace had been put into the shoe that morning.  From that he went on to the usual gibberish of French, the usual accusation against men in the neighbourhood, the usual melange of Chinese tortures and gruesome operations.  From Kraill’s horrified face Marcella saw that he understood more than she did.  She had never been sufficiently morbid to ask anyone to translate his words for her, even after more than three years of them.

She wondered weakly what would happen.  Judging Kraill by her father and Dr. Angus she knew that his ordinary code of convention could not let him disregard Louis as the others did, as being merely a rather weak, silly young man, who “went on the shikker” every month and made many varieties of a fool of himself.  Everyone gave him the mixture of disgusted toleration and amusement given to a spoilt child who kicks his nurse in the park, and pounds his toys to pieces.  Marcella never talked about him to anyone; she cut off ungraciously the attempts at sympathetic pumping made by the women at Klondyke.  They concluded that she did not feel anything since she never cried out.  But, looking at Kraill’s face for one fleeting instant Marcella knew that he understood how sore and shamed she was.

“He’s very ill, really,” she said in a low voice.  “But no one believes it.  They think he’s just wicked.  I’ll tell you all about it to-morrow.  I expect you know without my telling you.  But I didn’t want you to see him like this.  I’ve fixed up a bed for you at home.  Will you let Jerry show you the way?”