ng his shoulders and making
wriggling recessive movements such as a man might make who stood in
darkness among moving pollutions. But his glee had gone. It had grown
indeed to a grey effervescence that set a tremor working over his
features, made him speak in shaken phrases, and unsteadied everything
about him except the gloating stare which he bent on her bowed head
because he was eager to see her face, which surely would look plain with
all her colour gone. "There's just a limit to everything, Miss Melville,
a limit to everything. You seem to have come to it. Ay, long ago, I have
been thinking! You'd better know at once that you were seen late on
Saturday night, hanging about with a man. It sounded like yon chemist
chap from the description. You were seen entering a cab and driving
away. I won't tell you"--he stepped backwards, swelled a little, and
became the respectable man who has to hem a dry embarrassed cough before
he speaks of evil--"what the client made of it all." And then he bent
again in that contracted, loathing attitude, as if they were standing in
an unspacious sewer and she had led him there, and with that viscous
sibilance he said many things which she could not fully understand, but
which seemed to mean that under decent life there was an oozy mud and
she had somehow wallowed in it. "But doubtless you'll be able to give a
satisfactory explanation of the incident," he finished; and as she
continued to bow her head, so that he could not see the effects of this
misery which he had so adroitly thrust upon her, he leant over her
crying out he hardly knew what, save that they were persecuting things.

But when she slowly raised her chin he saw with rage that though he had
spoilt the colour of her skin with fear, and made her break up the
serene pattern of her features with twitching efforts to hold back her
tears, he had not been able to destroy the secondary meaning of her
face. It had ceased to be pretty; it no longer offered lovely untroubled
surfaces to the lips. But it still proclaimed that she was indubitably
precious as a diamond is indubitably hard; it still calmly declared that
if evil had come out of his meeting with her it had been contrived out
of innocence by some dark alchemy of his own soul; it still moved him to
a madness of unprofitable loyalty and tenderness. In every way he was
defeated. It seemed now the least of his miseries that he had failed to
destroy his father's persuasion that Elle