The restaurant had been steadily emptying.  Monsieur Gustav and his ample-bosomed wife were seated at a distant table, eating their own dinner.

“Why couldn’t you have married?” asked Joan.

The girl shrugged her shoulders.  “Who was there for me to marry?” she answered.  “The men who wanted me:  clerks, young tradesmen, down at home—­I wasn’t taking any of that lot.  And the men I might have fancied were all of them too poor.  There was one student.  He’s got on since.  Easy enough for him to talk about waiting.  Meanwhile.  Well, it’s like somebody suggesting dinner to you the day after to-morrow.  All right enough, if you’re not troubled with an appetite.”

The waiter came to clear the table.  They were almost the last customers left.  The man’s tone and manner jarred upon Joan.  She had not noticed it before.  Joan ordered coffee and the girl, exchanging a joke with the waiter, added a liqueur.

“But why should you give up your art?” persisted Joan.  It was that was sticking in her mind.  “I should have thought that, if only for the sake of the child, you would have gone on with it.”

“Oh, I told myself all that,” answered the girl.  “Was going to devote my life to it.  Did for nearly two years.  Till I got sick of living like a nun:  never getting a bit of excitement.  You see, I’ve got the poison in me.  Or, maybe, it had always been there.”

“What’s become of it?” asked Joan.  “The child?”

“Mother’s got it,” answered the girl.  “Seemed best for the poor little beggar.  I’m supposed to be dead, and my husband gone abroad.”  She gave a short, dry laugh.  “Mother brings him up to see me once a year.  They’ve got quite fond of him.”

“What are you doing now?” asked Joan, in a low tone.

“Oh, you needn’t look so scared,” laughed the girl, “I haven’t come down to that.”  Her voice had changed.  It had a note of shrillness.  In some indescribable way she had grown coarse.  “I’m a kept woman,” she explained.  “What else is any woman?”

She reached for her jacket; and the waiter sprang forward and helped her on with it, prolonging the business needlessly.  She wished him “Good evening” in a tone of distant hauteur, and led the way to the door.  Outside the street was dim and silent.  Joan held out her hand.

“No hope of happy endings,” she said with a forced laugh.  “Couldn’t marry him I suppose?”

“He has asked me,” answered the girl with a swagger.  “Not sure that it would suit me now.  They’re not so nice to you when they’ve got you fixed up.  So long.”

She turned abruptly and walked rapidly away.  Joan moved instinctively in the opposite direction, and after a few minutes found herself in a broad well-lighted thoroughfare.  A newsboy was shouting his wares.

“‘Orrible murder of a woman.  Shockin’ details.  Speshul,” repeating it over and over again in a hoarse, expressionless monotone.