On recovering from the excitement of this scene, Nancy regretted her severity; the poor girl in the hideous bonnet had fallen very low, and her state of mind called for forbearance.  The treachery for which Jessica sought pardon was easy to forgive; not so, however, the impertinent rebuke, which struck at a weak place in Nancy’s conscience.  Just when the course of time and favour of circumstances seemed to have completely healed that old wound, Jessica, with her crazy malice grotesquely disguised, came to revive the half-forgotten pangs, the shame and the doubt that had seemed to be things gone by.  It would have become her, Nancy felt, to treat her hapless friend of years ago in a spirit of gentle tolerance; that she could not do so proved her—­and she recognised the fact—­ still immature, still a backward pupil in the school of life.—­ ’And in the Jubilee year I thought myself a decidedly accomplished person!’

Never mind.  Her husband would come this evening.  Of him she could learn without humiliation.

His arrival was later than of wont.  Only at eleven o’clock, when with disappointment she had laid aside her book to go to bed, did Tarrant’s rap sound on the window.

‘I had given you up,’ said Nancy.

‘Yet you are quite good-tempered.’

‘Why not?’

’It is the pleasant custom of wives to make a husband uncomfortable if he comes late.’

‘Then I am no true wife!’ laughed Nancy.

‘Something much better,’ Tarrant muttered, as he threw off his overcoat.

He began to talk of ordinary affairs, and nearly half-an-hour elapsed before any mention was made of the event that had bettered their prospects.  Nancy looked over a piece of his writing in an evening paper which he had brought; but she could not read it with attention.  The paper fell to her lap, and she sat silent.  Clearly, Tarrant would not be the first to speak of what was in both their minds.  The clock ticked; the rain pattered without; the journalist smoked his pipe and looked thoughtfully at the ceiling.

‘Are you sorry,’ Nancy asked, ‘that I am no longer penniless?’

’Ah—­to be sure.  We must speak of that.  No, I’m not sorry.  If I get run over, you and the boy—­’

’Can make ourselves comfortable, and forget you; to be sure.  But for the present, and until you do get run over?’

‘You wish to make changes?’

‘Don’t you?’

’In one or two respects, perhaps.  But leave me out of the question.  You have an income of your own to dispose of; nothing oppressively splendid, I suppose.  What do you think of doing?’

‘What do you advise?’

’No, no.  Make your own suggestion.

Nancy smiled, hesitated, and said at length: 

‘I think we ought to take a house.’

‘In London?’

‘That’s as you wish.’

‘Not at all.  As you wish.  Do you want society?’