man in the shop had told her was the best thing out.  It had a clasp which had worked beautifully in the shop, but which, for some reason, on the journey had caused her both pain and anxiety.  Convinced, however, that she could cure it and open the bag the moment she could get to that splendid new pair of pincers in her trunk, which a man had only yesterday told her were the latest, she still felt that she had a soft thing, and dear John must have one like it if she could get him one at the Stores to-morrow.

John, who had come away early from the Home Office, met her in that dark hall, to which he had paid no attention since his young wife died, fifteen years ago.  Embracing him, with a smile of love almost timorous from intensity, Frances Freeland looked him up and down, and, catching what light there was gleaming on his temples, determined that she had in her bag, as soon as she could get it open, the very thing for dear John’s hair.  He had such a nice moustache, and it was a pity he was getting bald.  Brought to her room, she sat down rather suddenly, feeling, as a fact, very much like fainting—­a condition of affairs to which she had never in the past and intended never in the future to come, making such a fuss!  Owing to that nice new patent clasp, she had not been able to get at her smelling-salts, nor the little flask of brandy and the one hard-boiled egg without which she never travelled; and for want of a cup of tea her soul was nearly dying within her.  Dear John would never think she had not had anything since breakfast (she travelled always by a slow train, disliking motion), and she would not for the world let him know—­so near dinner-time, giving a lot of trouble!  She therefore stayed quite quiet, smiling a little, for fear he might suspect her.  Seeing John, however, put her bag down in the wrong place, she felt stronger.

“No, darling—­not there—­in the window.”

And while he was changing the position of the bag, her heart swelled with joy because his back was so straight, and with the thought:  ’What a pity the dear boy has never married again!  It does so keep a man from getting moony!’ With all that writing and thinking he had to do, such important work, too, it would have been so good for him, especially at night.  She would not have expressed it thus in words—­that would not have been quite nice—­but in thought Frances Freeland was a realist.

When he was gone, and she could do as she liked, she sat stiller than ever, knowing by long experience that to indulge oneself in private only made it more difficult not to indulge oneself in public.  It really was provoking that this nice new clasp should go wrong just this once, and that the first time it was used!  And she took from her pocket a tiny prayer-book, and, holding it to the light, read the eighteenth psalm—­it was a particularly good one, that never failed her when she felt low—­she used no glasses, and up to the present had avoided