ing this silly game again, young
fellow."

After delivering himself thus in a stern whisper, strained almost to
extinction, he drove on, ruminating solemnly. To his mind the incident
remained somewhat obscure. But his intellect, though it had lost its
pristine vivacity in the benumbing years of sedentary exposure to the
weather, lacked not independence or sanity. Gravely he dismissed the
hypothesis of Stevie being a drunken young nipper.

Inside the cab the spell of silence, in which the two women had endured
shoulder to shoulder the jolting, rattling, and jingling of the journey,
had been broken by Stevie's outbreak. Winnie raised her voice.

"You've done what you wanted, mother. You'll have only yourself to thank
for it if you aren't happy afterwards. And I don't think you'll be.
That I don't. Weren't you comfortable enough in the house? Whatever
people'll think of us--you throwing yourself like this on a Charity?"

"My dear," screamed the old woman earnestly above the noise, "you've been
the best of daughters to me. As to Mr Verloc--there--"

Words failing her on the subject of Mr Verloc's excellence, she turned
her old tearful eyes to the roof of the cab. Then she averted her head
on the pretence of looking out of the window, as if to judge of their
progress. It was insignificant, and went on close to the curbstone.
Night, the early dirty night, the sinister, noisy, hopeless and rowdy
night of South London, had overtaken her on her last cab drive. In the
gas-light of the low-fronted shops her big cheeks glowed with an orange
hue under a black and mauve bonnet.

Mrs Verloc's mother's complexion had become yellow by the effect of age
and from a natural predisposition to biliousness, favoured by the trials
of a difficult and worried existence, first as wife, then as widow. It
was a complexion, that under the influence of a blush would take on an
orange tint. And this woman, modest indeed but hardened in the fires of
adversity, of an age, moreover, when blushes are not expected, had
positively blushed before her daughter. In the privacy of a
four-wheeler, on her way to a charity cottage (one of a row) which by the
exiguity of its dimensions and the simplicity of its accommodation, might
well have been devised in kindness as a place of training for the still
more straitened circumstances of the grave, she was forced to hid from
her own child a blush of remorse and shame.

Whatever people will think?