“Oh, she’ll listen to reason from any one but me.  And there are things you can say to her that I can’t.  I say, will you?”

“I will if you like.  But I don’t suppose it will do one atom of good.  It never does, you know.  Where does the woman live?”

He took down the address on the visiting-card that Gorst gave him.

Between six and seven that evening he presented himself at one of many tiny, two-storied, red brick and stucco houses that stood in a long flat street, each with a narrow mat of grass laid before its bay-window.  It was the new quarter of the respectable milliners and clerks; and Majendie gathered that the prodigal had taken some pains to lodge his Maggie with decent people.  He reasoned farther that such an arrangement could only be possible, given the complete rupture of their relations.

A clean, kindly woman opened the door.  She admitted with some show of hesitation that Miss Forrest was at home, and led him to a sitting-room on the upper floor.  As he followed her he heard a door open; a dress rustled on the landing, and another door opened and shut again.

Maggie was not in the room as Majendie entered.  From signs of recent occupation he gathered that she had risen up and fled at his approach.

The woman went into the adjoining room and returned, politely embarrassed.  “Miss Forrest is very sorry, sir, but she can’t see anybody.”

He wrote his name on Gorst’s card and sent her back with it.

Then Maggie came to him.

He remembered long afterwards the manner of her coming; how he heard her blow her poor nose outside the door before she entered; how she stood on the threshold and looked at him, and made him a stiff little bow; how she approached shyly and slowly, with her arms hanging awkwardly at her sides, and her eyes fixed on him in terror, as if she were drawn to him against her will; how she held Gorst’s card tight in her poor little hand; how her eyes had foreknowledge of his errand and besought him to spare her; and how in her awkwardness she yet preserved her inimitable grace.

He could hardly believe that this was the girl he had once seen in Evans’s shop when he was buying flowers for Anne.  The girl in Evans’s shop was only a pretty girl.  Maggie, at five-and-twenty, living under Gorst’s “protection,” and attired according to his taste, was almost (but not quite) a pretty lady.  Maggie was neither inhumanly tall, nor inhumanly slender; she was simply and supremely feminine.  She was dressed delicately in black, a choice which made brilliant the beauty of her colouring.  Her hair was abundant, fawn-dark, laced with gold.  Her face was a full short oval.  Its whiteness was the tinged whiteness of pure cream, with a rose in it that flamed, under Maggie’s swift emotions, to a sudden red.  She had soft grey eyes dappled with a tawny green.  Her little high-arched nose was sensitive to the constant play of her upper lip;