the cab drove off carrying them away for a brief
week-end, which was all Anderson and Dromo would allow. She tasted a new
delight in this making of happiness.

Holt had not attended the ceremony, for he felt too weak. His interest
in the affair had been dim, for he looked upon it as one of Victoria's
whims. He was ceasing to judge as he ceased to appreciate, so much was
his physical weakness gaining upon him; all his faculty of action was
concentrated in the desire which gnawed at his very being. Victoria
reminded him of his promise, and, finding his cheque book for him, laid
it on the table.

'Five hundred pounds,' she said. 'Better make it out to me. It's very
good of you, Jack.'

'Yes, yes,' he said dully, writing the date and the words 'Mrs Ferris.'
Then he stopped. Concentrating with an effort he wrote the word 'five.'

'Five . . . five . . .' he murmured. Then he looked up at Victoria with
something like vacuousness.

A wild idea flashed through her brain. She must act. Oh, no, dreadful.
Yet freedom, freedom. . . . He could not understand . . . she must do
it.

'Thousand,' she prompted in a low voice.

'Thousand pounds,' went Jack's voice as he wrote obediently. Then,
mechanically, reciting the formula his father had taught him. 'Five,
comma, 0, 0, 0, dash, 0, dash, 0. John Holt.'

Victoria put her hands down on the table to take the cheque he had just
torn out. All her fingers were trembling with the terrible excitement of
a slave watching his fetters being struck off. As she took it up and
looked at it, while the figures danced, Holt's eyes grew more insistent
on her other hand. Slowly his fingers closed over it, raised it to his
lips. With his eyes closed, breathing a little deeper, he covered her
palm with lingering kisses.

CHAPTER XIX

THE endowment of Betty was soon completed. Advised by the bank manager
to whom she confided something of the young couple's improvident
tendencies, Victoria vested the money in a trust administered by an
insurance company. The deed was so drafted that it could not be charged;
the capital could not be touched, excepting the case of male offspring
who, after their mother's death, would divide it on their respective
twenty-fifth birthdays; as she distrusted her own sex and perhaps still
more the stock from which the girls might spring, she bound their
proportion in perpetuity; failing offspring she provided that, following
on his wife's decease, Mr Edward Sm