"He lived here?" (What, another wonder?)
"Yes. Well, I'll send your steak in. Good-bye." Billy bolted.
He had lived there too! How ex—how entirely to have been expected! Louie walked round the room, looking at the walls, the ceiling, out of the windows, anew. He had lived there: read, eaten, slept there; what a coinci—what a perfectly natural circumstance! Then, leaning against the wall, she found Billy's study. Her eyes devoured it. She set it against the throne, and then walked to where he had stood when he had entered. She gave a rich, low laugh; she told herself what a fool she was; but folly so lovely made life. Again she looked at the wet painting. She had looked so to him——
She put the study back against the wall, but in another place. "That study's mine, Billy," she muttered; "mine, not yours or anybody else's, do you understand? You gave him my violets; he's welcome to them; this belongs to me. Jim! Jim!" she murmured.
"Well, I suppose it's crochet now," she went on by-and-by. "Do you realise, Louie Causton, that you've sat your last? And have you any idea of what you're going to do instead? It looks as though Kitty's fifteen shillings would come in useful after all."
As if otherwise she might have forgotten it, she repeated to herself, over and over again, that she was to meet him at Swan and Edgar's at half-past ten. At one of the repetitions—it was as she was cooking her steak over the little gas-ring that, perhaps, had once been his—it occurred to her why he had muttered that quick "No, no," when she had proposed that meeting-place. She glowed, she laughed through a sheen of tender tears. "Dear, dear one! You don't think that corner good enough for us, my sweet little outcast and me. Well, we won't thank you; we won't belittle him by thanking him, will we, Jimmy?——"
But she did not promise not to look her thanks when she met him at Swan and Edgar's at half-past ten.
Presently she pushed her plate away; she could not eat. She had felt her bosom rise once more. It had risen as it had never risen for anything or anybody save for the little Jimmy, and it rose, it seemed to her, for a similar reason. For in her hands even his physical safety lay. He was to be mothered too. Her unfelt arms were to be about him, the milk of her protection to be his life. By his strength he had thought to give himself to somebody else, but by his need he was still hers. A gladness richer than she had ever, ever known swelled within her. He, the great weakling—she, the strong one, to cherish and support——
"Jim!" she murmured, smiling, uplifted, lost. It was as if his weary, tawny head was on her breast.
And she was going to hear his voice again, at Swan and Edgar's, at half-past ten.