The girl fell back a step or two irresolutely.

“Ah! why do you trouble so?  What does it matter?” Then she added faintly, but hurriedly stumbling over her words: 

“He wasn’t a painter—­only for amusement; he didn’t exhibit.  He was a newspaper writer.  But he couldn’t get work, and got a place in a foreign-going steamer, to keep accounts, I think.  That was afterwards, and that’s why I looked for him at your dock.  They told me the ship had been there, but it wasn’t true.  Ah! let me be, sir, let me be!”

She broke off hastily, clasping her hands across her breast.

The story, though incoherent, was possible; Rainham could see no motive for her deceiving him, and yet he believed she was lying.  He merely shrugged his shoulders, with a rising lassitude.  He seemed to have been infected by her own dreariness, to labour under a disability of doing or saying any more; he, too, gave it up.  He wanted to get away out of the dingy room; its rickety table and chairs, its two vulgar vases on the stained mantel, its gross upholstery, seemed too trenchantly sordid in the strong August sun.  The child’s golden head—­she was growing intelligent now, and strong on her legs—­was the one bright spot in the room.  He stopped to pat it with a great pity, a sense of too much pathos in things flooding him, before he passed out again into the mean street.

CHAPTER XIII

September set in cold, with rain and east winds, and Rainham, a naturally chilly mortal, as he handed his coat to Lady Garnett’s butler, and followed him into the little library, where dinner was laid for three, congratulated himself that a seasonable fire crackled on the large hearth.

“I hardly expected you back yet,” he remarked, after the first greetings, stretching out his hands to the blaze; “and your note was a welcome surprise.  I almost think we are the only people in town.”

Lady Garnett shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of rich tolerance, as one who acknowledged the respectability of all tastes, whilst preferring her own.

“London has its charm, to me,” she remarked.  “We are glad to be back.  I am getting too old to travel—­that terrible crossing, and the terrible people one meets!”

Rainham smiled with absent sympathy, looking into the red coals.

“You must remember, I don’t know where you have been.  Tell me your adventures and your news.”

“I leave that to Mary, my dear,” said the old lady.

And at that moment the girl came in, looking stately and older than her age in one of the dark, high-cut dresses which she affected.  She shook hands with Rainham, smiling; and as they went to table he repeated his question.

“It is difficult,” she said; “we seem to have been everywhere.  Oh, we have been very restless this year, Philip.  I think we were generally in the train.  We tried Trouville——­”