at the first rush into the boat awaiting
them, and had them safe on and polished the day he preached the sermon of
gratitude for the special deliverance. There was a Warning! and it might
well be called, as he called it, from within. We're cared for, never
doubt. Aide-toi. Be ready dressed to help yourself in a calamity, or
you'll not stand in boots at your next Sermon, contrasting with the
burnt. That sounds like the moral.'

'She could have seen me,' Victor threw out an irritable suggestion. The
idea of the recent propinquity set hatred in motion.

'Scarcely likely. I'm told she sits looking on her lap, under the
beetling shade, until she hears an order for tinctures or powders, or a
mixture that strikes her fancy. It's possible to do more suicidal things
than sit the afternoons in a chemist's shop and see poor creatures get
their different passports to Orcus.'

Victor stepped mutely beneath the windows of the bellied glass-urns of
chemical wash. The woman might be inside there now! She might have seen
his figure in the shop-mirror! And she there! The wonder of it all seemed
to be, that his private history was not walking the streets. The thinness
of the partition concealing it, hardly guaranteed a day's immunity:
because this woman would live in London, in order to have her choice of a
central chemist's shop, where she could feed a ghastly imagination on the
various recipes . . . and while it would have been so much healthier for
her to be living in a recess of the country!

He muttered: 'Diseases--drugs!'

Those were the corresponding two strokes of the pendulum which kept the
woman going.

'And deadly spite.' That was the emanation of the monotonous horrible
conflict, for which, and by which, the woman lived.

In the neighbourhood of the shop, he could not but think of her through
the feelings of a man scorched by a furnace.

A little further on, he said: 'Poor soul!' He confessed to himself, that
latterly he had, he knew not why, been impatient with her, rancorous in
thought, as never before. He had hitherto aimed at a picturesque
tolerance of her vindictiveness; under suffering, both at Craye and
Creckholt; and he had been really forgiving. He accused her of dragging
him down to humanity's lowest.

But if she did that, it argued the possession of a power of a sort.

Her station in the chemist's shop he passed almost daily, appeared to him
as a sudden and a terrific rush to the front; though it was onl