ing to do? Where will
you live? Take my three hundred pounds if it will help you. I don't
want it just now. Keep it for me."

He had a moment of resolute, clear-sighted honesty. "No, my dear, if I
had it it would go in a week. I can't keep money; I never could. I'm
really better without any. I'm all right. You'll never get rid of
me--don't you fear. We've got more in common than you think, although
you're a good girl and I've gone to pieces a bit. All the same there's
plenty worse than me. Your aunt, for all her religion, is damned
difficult for a plain man to get along with. Most people would find me
better company, after all. One last word, Maggie."

He bent down and whispered to her. "Don't you go getting caught by that
sweep who runs their chapel up in London. He's a humbug if ever there
was one--you mark my words. I know a thing or two. He's done your aunts
a lot of harm, and he'll have his dirty fingers on you if you let him."

So he departed, his last kiss mingled with the usual aroma of whisky
and tobacco, his last attitude, as he turned away, that strange
confusion of assumed dignity and natural genial stupidity that was so
especially his.

Maggie turned, with all her new defiant resolution, to face the world
alone with her Aunt Anne. Throughout the next day she was busied with
collecting her few possessions, with her farewells to the one or two
people in the village who had been kind to her, and with little sudden,
almost surreptitious visits to corners of the house, the garden, the
wood where she had at one time or another been happy.

As the evening fell and a sudden storm of rain leapt up from beneath
the hill and danced about the house, she had a wild longing to stay--to
stay at any cost and in any discomfort. London had no longer interest,
but only terror and dismay. She ran out into the dark and rain-drenched
garden, felt her way to an old and battered seat that had seen in older
days dolls' tea-parties and the ravages of bad-temper, stared from it
across the kitchen-garden to the lights of the village, that seemed to
rock and shiver in the wind and rain.

She stared passionately at the lights, her heart beating as though it
would suffocate her. At last, her clothes soaked with the storm, her
hair dripping, she returned to the house. Her aunt was in the hall.

"My dear Maggie, where have you been?" in a voice that was kind but
aghast.

"In the garden," said Maggie, hating her aunt.

"But it's