ld come
now. I'll speak to our Matron, and let you know to-night." She squeezed
his hand hard.

"Dear Edward, I'm so glad to see you again. You're the first of our
family I've seen for sixteen years. I wonder if you'd bring Noel to have
supper at my flat to-night--Just nothing to eat, you know! It's a tiny
place. There's a Captain Fort coming; a nice man."

Pierson accepted, and as he walked away he thought: 'Dear Leila! I
believe it was Providence. She wants sympathy. She wants to feel the
past is the past. How good women are!'

And the sun, blazing suddenly out of a cloud, shone on his black figure
and the little gold cross, in the middle of Portland Place.

X

Men, even if they are not artistic, who have been in strange places
and known many nooks of the world, get the scenic habit, become open
to pictorial sensation. It was as a picture or series of pictures that
Jimmy Fort ever afterwards remembered his first supper at Leila's. He
happened to have been all day in the open, motoring about to horse
farms under a hot sun; and Leila's hock cup possessed a bland and subtle
strength. The scenic sense derived therefrom had a certain poignancy,
the more so because the tall child whom he met there did not drink it,
and her father seemed but to wet his lips, so that Leila and he had
all the rest. Rather a wonderful little scene it made in his mind,
very warm, glowing, yet with a strange dark sharpness to it, which came
perhaps from the black walls.

The flat had belonged to an artist who was at the war. It was but a
pocket dwelling on the third floor. The two windows of the little square
sitting-room looked out on some trees and a church. But Leila, who hated
dining by daylight, had soon drawn curtains of a deep blue over them.
The picture which Fort remembered was this: A little four-square table
of dark wood, with a Chinese mat of vivid blue in the centre, whereon
stood a silver lustre bowl of clove carnations; some greenish glasses
with hock cup in them; on his left, Leila in a low lilac frock, her neck
and shoulders very white, her face a little powdered, her eyes large,
her lips smiling; opposite him a black-clothed padre with a little
gold cross, over whose thin darkish face, with its grave pointed beard,
passed little gentle smiles, but whose deep sunk grey eyes were burnt
and bright; on his right, a girl in a high grey frock, almost white,
just hollowed at the neck, with full sleeves to the elbow, so tha