"Oh—bravo!" he cried. "Wait it is, then. By Jove, when it does come, you'll have deserved it!... Here, shove your glass over—I believe you're entirely right—but if it was only for your consummate cheek we should have to drink to it!"

And he filled up the two glasses with the vivid green liqueur again, touching his against mine.

I left him shortly after, or rather he left me in order to keep one of his urgent and mysterious appointments; and I wandered slowly down towards my own abode.

This was a large upper room near the Cobden Statue—a proximity that for some reason or other always afforded my partner-to-be private mirth. I had taken it because its size fitted it both for living purposes and for the storing of the things I had got against my marriage as well. It was the fourth of the five floors of a new, terra-cotta-fronted, retail drapery establishment (experience had taught me that the biggest rooms are always over shops); and from its plate-glass windows below to its sham gables held up like pieces of stage scenery by iron braces above, it was a mass of ridiculous ornament—coats of arms, swags of fruit and flowers, and feeble grotesques with horns and tails and grins, the whole looking as if it had been squeezed on from some gigantic pink icing-tube such as they use for the modelling of wedding-cakes. But I lived inside it, not outside, and I had made the place exceedingly comfortable. I had no fewer than four large windows, two looking over the High Street, one diagonally from a rounded corner, and the fourth over the little railing-enclosed garden of a neighbouring crescent. As I was high enough up to dispense with blinds and curtains, these four windows admitted a flood of admirable light on an interior that, large as it was, was over-furnished; and there was no frippery to prevent my throwing up my sashes and looking down among the terra-cotta gargoyles on the walking hats below.

Evie and I had done much of our six months' courting in second-hand dealers' shops. Resolving that our engagement should be a short one, and knowing that those who have little either of money or time have, in furnishing as in everything else, to pay through the nose for their purchases, we had started at once. What had remained of a sum of money Evie's aunt had long had in trust for her against her one day setting up housekeeping on her own account had enabled us to do this. At first the sum had been one hundred and fifty pounds; a former purchase of clothing, of which only the black garments had ever been worn, had reduced it by more than a third; and of what had become of more than half the balance my light, lofty room now bore witness.

It improved my spirits to be among our joint belongings, and by the time I had made tea for myself, much of my despondency of earlier in the day had gone. I looked round, and began to tell myself over again the story of our acquisitions. There was not a piece that did not contribute its chapter. That bow-fronted chest of drawers with the old mirror on it we had first seen on a pavement in Upper Street, Islington; and we had had a long debate in Miss Angela Soames' sitting-room in Woburn Place before deciding to buy it—a debate much interrupted by less practical matters, with Miss Angela's pink-shaded lamp turned economically low, and Miss Angela herself intelligently off to bed. I had only to look at our odd assortment of chairs in order to see Evie again as she had stood in the dim back parts of this shop or that—to see again the whites of her eyes, brilliant as if her skin had been a Moor's, her hair dark as a black sweet-pea, the round neck with the little pulse in it, and the slender, just-grown lines of bosom or back or hips as she stooped or straightened. Over one extravagance her voice had broken out in shocked and delicious reproach; over another happy find she had had to turn away lest the dealer should see her eagerness and increase the price; and there had been laughs and bickerings and confusions and byplays without number.... I have become something of a connoisseur since then; but nothing I have acquired at Spink's or Christie's means to me what those coppery old Sheffield cream-jugs and caddies and those now-valuable sketches of Billy Izzard's meant....

Then, at seven o'clock, I washed, put on my hat, and went out. Evie and her aunt were due to arrive at Victoria at a quarter to eight.

I picked them out by their attire far down the platform, and advanced to meet them. With a leap of relief I noted Evie's little quickening as she saw me. Black "suited" Miss Angela Soames—suited her tower of white yet young-looking hair, as it also suited her habits of rather aimless retrospect and toying with stingless memories; but I hoped that Evie's present wearing of her four-year-old mourning would be her last. Naturally, she had not passed the day without tears. Her eyes were large, sombre patches; she held in her hand a little hard ball of damp handkerchief; and I noticed that a little graveside clay still adhered to the toes of her boots. But I judged that a night's rest would set her up again, and as we rumbled in a bus past the Houses of Parliament and up Whitehall, I bespoke her time for the afternoon of the morrow. I asked her, could she guess why? and, putting the screwed-up handkerchief away, she said something about the F.B.C.

"No," I replied,—"not directly, that is."

"Mr Pepper?"