black man made me feel quite shaky."

Jimmy frowned. "Why do you starve yourself in that way?" he asked.

In after years, he often thought of this question and her answer. He
had been hungry himself more than once, and he knew, only too well, what
it meant; but, somehow, he had never pictured a well-dressed girl as
suffering that way.

"I only had a penny left, the one I spent on that bun, and no one will
trust you with as much as a loaf round here. I was afraid you would
notice how greedy I was at tea." Then, as he flushed awkwardly and began
to speak, she stopped him with a little gesture. "Why should you have
thought of it? You were very good, as it was. And I'm all right now. I
got a postal order last night," she added rather hurriedly; then she
changed the subject abruptly, and went on to talk of one or two matters
of passing interest, which the papers had been booming for want of
anything of real importance. She had evidently received an average
education, Jimmy could see that plainly, and yet he was puzzled, for in
many of her ideas, and especially in her strong prejudices, she belied
her apparent age; for they were those of a child of fourteen, rather
than of a girl of some two or three and twenty. Insensibly, he found
himself listening to her as one would to a child, and then, a moment
later, she would bring out some cynical scrap of wisdom, evidently the
fruit of bitter experience, which sounded strange coming from her lips.
Yet, despite the utter unconventionality, there was no hint of fastness
about her, and even when she touched by implication on her way of life,
she did so with a kind of frank simplicity, hiding nothing and trying to
excuse nothing.

"What do you think of my little flat?" she asked suddenly, after what
had been rather a long pause. "It's very tiny, of course; but it's a
home, and when you've had nowhere to go to, not even a lodging----" She
broke off, and stared into the fire. "It's simply awful to have
nowhere," she went on after a while. "To walk about hour after hour with
the mud squelching through your shoes, and nothing to eat; and getting
more hopeless as midnight comes on. I was out two whole nights."

Jimmy breathed heavily; he had often heard the same sort of thing from
men; but it sounded very different coming from the lips of a girl.

"And then one day I got ten pounds," Lalage continued, "and I made up my
mind I would have a home. I paid a month's rent in advance--they don