"Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe: let her breasts satisfy thee at all times: and be thou ravished always with her love."

"And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?"

"His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins."

CHAPTER I

THE GIRLS IN THE FOURTH STORY FLAT

"We were two daughters of one race;

She was the fairest in the face;"

Tennyson.

In the sitting room of a small forty-five pound flat, upon the fourth floor of a tall red-brick building in West Kensington known as Queens Mansions, Ethel Harrison, the girl who lived with Rita Wallace, sat sewing by the window.