“Ah, but this is a special occasion,” said Mr. Philip, with so genial an expression that she stared up at him, her eyebrows knit and her mouth puckering back a smile, her deep hopeful prepossession, which she held in common with all young people, that things really happened prettily, making her ready to believe that it was all a mistake and he was about to announce a treat or a promotion.  And he, reading this ridiculous sign of youth, bent over her, prolonging his kind beam and her response to it, so that afterwards, when he undeceived her, there should be no doubt at all that she had worn that silly air of expecting something nice to be given to her, and no doubt that he had seen and understood and jeered at it.  Then the wave of his malice broke and soused her.  “Things have come to a head, Miss Melville!  There’s been a client complaining!”

She drew herself up.  “A client complaining!” she cried, and he hated her still more, for she had again eluded him.  She had forgotten him and the trap he had laid to make a fool of her in her suspicion that someone had dared to question her efficiency.  “Well, what’s that to do with me?  Whoever’s been complaining—­and no doubt if your clients once began at that game they wouldn’t need to stop between now and the one o’clock gun—­it’s not likely I’m among his troubles.  So far as my work goes I’m practically infallible.”

“It’s not your work that’s been spoken of,” said Mr. Philip, laughing.  “Perhaps we might call it your play.”

He had begun to speak, as he always did when they were alone, in a thick whisper, as if they were doing something unlawful together.  He had drawn near to her, as he always did, and was hunching his shoulders and making wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in darkness among moving pollutions.  But his glee had gone.  It had grown indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with all her colour gone.  “There’s just a limit to everything, Miss Melville, a limit to everything.  You seem to have come to it.  Ay, long ago, I have been thinking!  You’d better know at once that you were seen late on Saturday night, hanging about with a man.  It sounded like yon chemist chap from the description.  You were seen entering a cab and driving away.  I won’t tell you”—­he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before he speaks of evil—­“what the client made of it all.”  And then he bent again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and she had somehow wallowed in it.  “But doubtless you’ll be able to give a satisfactory explanation of the incident,” he finished; and as she continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.