“Missus won’t see them.  The moment you come in, you’ll put them on, and just before going out—­you’ll take them off!  See!”

“Yessir.  Then nobody’ll see me looking so grand but you.”

“That’s it.  And wouldn’t you rather look grand for me than for anybody else?”

“Of course I would, sir,” said Mary Ann, earnestly, with a grateful little sigh.

So Lancelot measured her wrist, feeling her pulse beat madly.  She really had a very little hand, though to his sensitive vision the roughness of the skin seemed to swell it to a size demanding a boxing glove.  He bought her six pairs of tan kid, in a beautiful cardboard box.  He could ill afford the gift, and made one of his whimsical grimaces when he got the bill.  The young lady who served him looked infinitely more genteel than Mary Ann.  He wondered what she would think if she knew for whom he was buying these dainty articles.  Perhaps her feelings would be so outraged she would refuse to participate in the transaction.  But the young lady was happily unconscious; she had her best smile for the handsome, aristocratic young gentleman, and mentioned his moustache later to her bosom-friend in the next department.

And thus Mary Ann and Lancelot became the joint owners of a secret, and coplayers in a little comedy.  When Mary Ann came into the room, she would put whatever she was carrying on a chair, gravely extract her gloves from her pocket, and draw them on, Lancelot pretending not to know she was in the room, though he had just said, “Come in.”  After allowing her a minute he would look up.  In the course of a week this became mechanical, so that he lost the semi-ludicrous sense of secrecy which he felt at first, as well as the little pathetic emotion inspired by her absolute unconsciousness that the performance was not intended for her own gratification.  Nevertheless, though he could now endure to see Mary Ann handling the sugar tongs, he remained cold to her for some weeks.  He had kissed her again in the flush of her joy at the sight of the gloves, but after that there was a reaction.  He rarely went to the club now (there was no one with whom he was in correspondence except music publishers, and they didn’t reply), but he dropped in there once soon after the glove episode, looked over the papers in the smoking-room, and chatted with a popular composer and one or two men he knew.  It was while the waiter was holding out the coffee-tray to him that Mary Ann flashed upon his consciousness.  The thought of her seemed so incongruous with the sober magnificence, the massive respectability that surrounded him, the cheerful, marble hearth reddened with leaping flame, the luxurious lounges, the well-groomed old gentlemen smoking eighteenpenny cheroots, the suave, noiseless satellites, that Lancelot felt a sudden pang of bewildered shame.  Why, the very waiter who stood bent before him would disdain her.  He took his coffee hastily, with a sense of personal unworthiness.  This feeling soon evaporated, but it left less of resentment against Mary Ann which made him inexplicable to her.  Fortunately, her habit of acceptance saved her some tears, though she shed others.  And there remained always the gloves.  When she was putting them on she always felt she was slipping her hands in his.