ct work.

"Him?"

"The peeler," Milly Sanders nodded; and it flashed on Gilbart that the
policeman's joke, the carriage, the girl's face and these thoughts of
his had all gone by in something less than ten seconds. "He've got the
'ump to-night, that's what's the matter with 'im." And Milly Sanders
nodded again reassuringly.

"What are you doing here?" Gilbart asked.

"Me? Oh, it's in the way of business, as you might say. I comes here
to pick up 'ints. I s'pose now you thought 'twasn't very
feelin'-'earted, and my Dick gone away foreign only this mornin'?"

He remembered now that the girl's zeal for Mission work had cooled ever
since she had been walking-out with her Dick--a young stoker in the
_Berenice_.

"I reckon that's the last of the dinner-guests. The others won't be
comin' much before ten. Well, I'm off to the 'Oe; there's going to be
fireworks, and that's the best place for seein'."

"In the way of business, too, I suppose?" said Gilbart, and wondered how
he could say it.

Milly giggled. "You 'ad me there," she confessed. "But what's the good
to give way? I'm sure"--with conviction--"it's just what Dick would
like me to do. I'm going, anyway. So long!" She paused: "that is--
unless you'd like to come along, too?"

It was, after all, astonishingly easy. Even if he found and convinced
the Admiral, nothing could be done. Why then should he hasten all this
misery? Was it not, rather, an act of large mercy to hold back the
news? Say that by holding his tongue he delayed it by twenty-four
hours; life after all was made up of days and not so very many of them.
By silence then--it stood to reason--he gained from woe a clear day for
hundreds. Meanwhile here stood one of those hundreds. Might he not
give her, under the very shadow of fate, an hour or two of actual,
positive happiness? He told himself this, knowing all the while that he
lied. He knew that the thing was easier to put off than to do. He knew
that he took Milly's arm in his not to comfort her (although he meant to
do this, too) but to drug his own conscience, and because he was mad--
yes, mad--for human company and support. For hours--it seemed for
weeks--he had been isolated, alone with that secret and his own soul.
He could bear it no longer; he must ease the torment--only for a
little--then perhaps he would go back to the Admiral. Chatter was what
he wanted, the sound of a fellow-creature's voice, babbling no matter
wha