“Oh, that’s good, my love.  I am glad of that.  Now you’ll rest yourself and get your looks back, and I shall be round a great deal to help you with the children.”

“I want to ask you to do something for me to-day, mother.”

“Certainly, my love.  Just name it.”

“I—­I want a free day.  To go into town and lunch and walk about by myself; no household shopping to do; no time to keep; no cooking to hurry back for....”

“What a funny idea, duck!” replied Grannie, still carefully keeping up the attitude of old dunderhead; “but I’m sure I’ll be only too delighted to go back home with you, and take the children out on the Heath this afternoon.  And I’ll put them to bed, too.  You’ll help me with these very little children, won’t you, Georgie?”

“’Ess, G’annie,” replied George importantly.

“Mummie needn’t hurry back, need she, Georgie?”

“She tan ’tay out all night,” replied George, showing a generous breadth of mind.

Grannie and mother both laughed heartily.

“I’ll run and put on my things at once,” said Mrs. Amber, transferring the baby to Marie’s lap, “and I’ll go back with you now.  I’m an idle old woman with nothing to do, and it will be a delight to me to take the children out.”

They trundled the grey baby-carriage back across the Heath, and toiled up the stone staircase of Welham Mansions to Number Thirty.  All the windows of the flat were opened; it looked almost fresh and bright once more; and a charwoman of stout build was dealing competently with the few remaining jobs.  Marie paid her; instructed her to return to-morrow, and went to make herself ready for town.

She left home again at twelve-thirty, taking with her a replenished purse, and a stock of tremluous emotions.  One was of dreadful solitude, a fear of loneliness, spineless and enervating; another of defiance; another of excitement; another of bravado; another almost of shame.

What should she, an old married woman with a family of three, want with a purposeless jaunt to town?  Since the birth of George she had never done such a thing.  She had never spent money on amusing herself, on passing an agreeable time.

It was almost as if, directly her husband, the master of her life and her children’s lives, turned his back, she filled her purse from the store he had left behind him, and went off frivolling.

“I do not care!” she said to herself fearsomely.  “I do not care a damn.  I’m off!”

One o’clock found her in the West End, a shabby, thin-faced woman of the suburbs, rubbing shoulders with scores of other women jostling round the shop windows.  All that she saw she longed for; but none of it was she foolish enough to buy.  Some cold prudence, an offshoot of her curious anger of the morning which still lingered with her, restrained.  Unformed, but working in her mind, was the beginning of an impression that during this coming year she