, and went on.

"I could not conceal it. I was too full of you. I daresay you could not
help seeing it in my eyes. But I could not guess it. You were always so
distant. . . ."

"What else did you expect?" burst out Mrs Verloc. "I was a respectable
woman--"

She paused, then added, as if speaking to herself, in sinister
resentment: "Till he made me what I am."

Ossipon let that pass, and took up his running. "He never did seem to me
to be quite worthy of you," he began, throwing loyalty to the winds.
"You were worthy of a better fate."

Mrs Verloc interrupted bitterly:

"Better fate! He cheated me out of seven years of life."

"You seemed to live so happily with him." Ossipon tried to exculpate the
lukewarmness of his past conduct. "It's that what's made me timid. You
seemed to love him. I was surprised--and jealous," he added.

"Love him!" Mrs Verloc cried out in a whisper, full of scorn and rage.
"Love him! I was a good wife to him. I am a respectable woman. You
thought I loved him! You did! Look here, Tom--"

The sound of this name thrilled Comrade Ossipon with pride. For his name
was Alexander, and he was called Tom by arrangement with the most
familiar of his intimates. It was a name of friendship--of moments of
expansion. He had no idea that she had ever heard it used by anybody.
It was apparent that she had not only caught it, but had treasured it in
her memory--perhaps in her heart.

"Look here, Tom! I was a young girl. I was done up. I was tired. I
had two people depending on what I could do, and it did seem as if I
couldn't do any more. Two people--mother and the boy. He was much more
mine than mother's. I sat up nights and nights with him on my lap, all
alone upstairs, when I wasn't more than eight years old myself. And
then--He was mine, I tell you. . . . You can't understand that. No man
can understand it. What was I to do? There was a young fellow--"

The memory of the early romance with the young butcher survived,
tenacious, like the image of a glimpsed ideal in that heart quailing
before the fear of the gallows and full of revolt against death.

"That was the man I loved then," went on the widow of Mr Verloc. "I
suppose he could see it in my eyes too. Five and twenty shillings a
week, and his father threatened to kick him out of the business if he
made such a fool of himself as to marry a girl with a crippled mother and
a crazy idiot of a boy on her hands. Bu