‘I’ve ordered the trap, Monica.  Will you come for a drive?’

‘I have promised to go into the town.  I’m very sorry.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

This was his latest mode of appealing to her—­with an air of pained resignation.

‘For a day or two I haven’t felt at all well,’ he continued gloomily.  ‘I thought a drive might do me good.’

‘Certainly.  I hope it will.  When would you like to have dinner?’

’I never care to alter the hours.  Of course I shall be back at the usual time.  Shall you be?’

‘Oh yes—­long before dinner.’

So she got away without any explanation.  At a quarter to four she reached the block of flats in which the Bevises (and Everard Barfoot) resided.  With a fluttering of the heart, she went very quietly upstairs, as if anxious that her footsteps should not be heard; her knock at the door was timid.

Bevis in person opened to her.

‘Delighted!  I thought it might be—­’

She entered, and walked into the first room, where she had been once before.  But to her surprise it was vacant.  She looked round and saw Bevis’s countenance gleaming with satisfaction.

‘My sisters will be here in a few minutes,’ he said.  ’A few minutes at most.  Will you take this chair, Mrs. Widdowson?  How delighted I am that you were able to come!’

So perfectly natural was his manner, that Monica, after the first moment of consternation, tried to forget that there was anything irregular in her presence here under these circumstances.  As regards social propriety, a flat differs in many respects from a house.  In an ordinary drawing-room, it could scarcely have mattered if Bevis entertained her for a short space until his sisters’ arrival; but in this little set of rooms it was doubtfully permissible for her to sit tete-a-tete with a young man, under any excuse.  And the fact of his opening the front door himself seemed to suggest that not even a servant was in the flat.  A tremor grew upon her as she talked, due in part to the consciousness that she was glad to be thus alone with Bevis.

‘A place like this must seem to you to be very unhomelike,’ he was saying, as he lounged on a low chair not very far from her.  ’The girls didn’t like it at all at first.  I suppose it’s a retrograde step in civilization.  Servants are decidedly of that opinion; we have a great difficulty in getting them to stay here.  The reason seems to me that they miss the congenial gossip of the area door.  At this moment we are without a domestic.  I found she compensated herself for disadvantages by stealing my tobacco and cigars.  She went to work with such a lack of discretion—­abstracting half a pound of honeydew at a time—­that I couldn’t find any sympathy for her.  Moreover, when charged with the delinquency, she became abusive, so very abusive that we were obliged to insist upon her immediate departure.’