“I have not been away, Pink.  I left home—­it’s a long story.  I am staying with my aunt, Mrs. Doyle.”

“Mrs. Doyle?  You are staying there?”

“Why not?  My father’s sister.”

His young face took on a certain sternness.

“If you knew what I suspect about Doyle, Lily, you wouldn’t let the same roof cover you.”  But he added, rather wistfully, “I wish I might see you sometimes.”

Lily’s head had gone up a trifle.  Why did her old world always try to put her in the wrong?  She had had to seek sanctuary, and the Doyle house had been the only sanctuary she knew.

“Since you feel as you do, I’m afraid that’s impossible.  Mr. Doyle’s roof is the only roof I have.”

“You have a home,” he said, sturdily.

“Not now.  I left, and my grandfather won’t have me back.  You mustn’t blame him, Pink.  We quarreled and I left.  I was as much responsible as he was.”

For a moment after she turned and disappeared inside the pharmacy door he stood there, then he put on his hat and strode down the street, unhappy and perplexed.  If only she had needed him, if she had not looked so self-possessed and so ever so faintly defiant, as though she dared him to pity her, he would have known what to do.  All he needed was to be needed.  His open face was full of trouble.  It was unthinkable that Lily should be in that center of anarchy; more unthinkable that Doyle might have filled her up with all sorts of wild ideas.  Women were queer; they liked theories.  A man could have a theory of life and play with it and boast about it, but never dream of living up to it.  But give one to a woman, and she chewed on it like a dog on a bone.  If those Bolshevists had got hold of Lily—!

The encounter had hurt Lily, too.  The fine edge of her exaltation was gone, and it did not return during her brief talk with Willy Cameron.  He looked much older and very thin; there were lines around his eyes she had never seen before, and she hated seeing him in his present surroundings.  But she liked him for his very unconsciousness of those surroundings.  One always had to take Willy Cameron as he was.

“Do you like it, Willy?” she asked.  It had dawned on her, with a sort of panic, that there was really very little to talk about.  All that they had had in common lay far in the past.

“Well, it’s my daily bread, and with bread costing what it does, I cling to it like a limpet to a rock.”

“But I thought you were studying, so you could do something else.”

“I had to give up the night school.  But I’ll get back to it sometime.”

She was lost again.  She glanced around the little shop, where once Edith Boyd had manicured her nails behind the counter, and where now a middle-aged woman stood with listless eyes looking out over the street.

“You still have Jinx, I suppose?”

“Yes.  I—­”