“Oh, lor’! what an awful thing this is about Mr. ’Arrersmith. To be knocked down by one o’ them cycles. The streets of London aint safe. And ’im a doctor, too, the cleverest doctor at the ’orspital.”
“What—what about him?”
“Knocked down by a cycle and killed in Grays Inn Road, jest by the ’orspital,” she returned with flavor.
Kinsman staggered to his feet. The fire licked out from the grate and seemed to sear him, to dry the words in his throat and dam up the glad accursed tears in his eyes.
He was no longer a bondman. He was free. He could bear to look at his flesh, his own until death, and after. He looked at his hands, torn and soiled, hands that had destroyed the cabinet.
His eyes fell on the last panel, which the fire was greedily eating; on the heap of ash that had meant so much beauty.
He dropped back in the chair. He laughed—laughter that gurgled with water as it fought its way through his throat. He could not see the blank wall for tears, whether for the cabinet, the dead man, or himself he did not know.
[A POLITICAL WOMAN.]
GULLY and his wife had one of the new sets just inside the gates. These sets are more expensive, more convenient, more respectable than the old ones. Lucinda—she was Gully’s wife—would never have consented to an old set. She set her face sternly against Bohemianism when it took a certain form. She didn’t object to it in the form of Liberty tea-gowns and discreet flirtations in the name of art and literature. Gully was a journalist. He found the Inn convenient, but Lucinda was always hoping plaintively that some day they would be able to afford a house in Bloomsbury, or, better still, a modest place in the country.