‘If you have time, you might perhaps give Alice a call.’

‘I shall do that as soon as ever I can.’

He had something else to say.

‘Perhaps Mrs. Westlake might ask her to come, whilst you are there.’

‘Very likely, I think,’ Adela replied, with an attempt at confidence.

It was only her second visit to London:  the first had been in winter time, and under conditions which had not allowed her to attend to anything she saw.  But for Stella’s presence there she would have feared London; her memory of it was like that of an ill dream long past; her mind only reverted to it in darkest hours, and then she shuddered.  But now she thought only of Stella; Stella was light and joy, a fountain of magic waters.  Her arrival at the house in Avenue Road was one of the most blissful moments she had ever known.  The servant led her upstairs to a small room, where the veiled sun made warmth on rich hangings, on beautiful furniture, on books and pictures, on ferns and flowers.  The goddess of this sanctuary was alone; as the door opened the notes of a zither trembled into silence, and Adela saw a light-robed loveliness rise and stand before her.  Stella took both her hands very gently, then looked into her face with eyes which seemed to be new from some high vision, then drew her within the paradise of an embrace.  The kiss was once more like that first touch of lips which had come to Adela on the verge of sleep; she quivered through her frame.

Mr. Westlake shortly joined them, and spoke with an extreme kindness which completed Adela’s sense of being at home.  No one disturbed them through the evening; Adela went to bed early and slept without a dream.

Stella and her husband talked of her in the night.  Mr. Westlake had, at the time of the election, heard for the first time the story of Mutimer and the obscure work-girl in Hoxton, and had taken some trouble to investigate it.  It had not reached his ears when the Hoxton Socialists made it a subject of public discussion; Comrade Roodhouse had inserted only a very general report of the proceedings in his paper the ’Tocsin, and even this Mr. Westlake had not seen.  But a copy of the pamphlet which circulated in Belwick came into his hands, and when he began to talk on the subject with an intimate friend, who, without being a Socialist, amused himself with following the movement closely, he heard more than he liked.  To Stella he said nothing of all this.  His own ultimate judgment was that you cannot expect men to be perfect, and that great causes have often been served by very indifferent characters.

‘She looks shockingly ill,’ he began to-night when alone with Stella.  ’Wasn’t there something said about consumption when she was at Exmouth?  Has she any cough?’

‘No, I don’t think it is that,’ Stella answered.

‘She seems glad to be with you.’

‘Very glad, I think.’

‘Did the loss of her child affect her deeply?’