whatever other scraps of occasions they could manage--Nan
began to take off and fold up and put away in her pocket her pretty,
dotty, becoming veil; as under the logic of his having so tremendously
ceased, in the shake of his dark storm-gust, to be engaged to another
woman. Her removal of that obstacle to a trusted friend's assuring
himself whether the peachlike bloom' of her finer facial curves bore
the test of such further inquiry into their cool sweetness as might
reinforce a mere baffled gaze--her momentous, complete surrender of so
much of her charm, let us say, both marked the change in the situation
of the pair and established the record of their perfect observance of
every propriety for so long before. They afterward in fact could have
dated it, their full clutch of their freedom and the bliss of their
having so little henceforth to consider save their impotence, their
poverty, their ruin; dated it from the hour of his recital to her
of the--at the first blush--quite appalling upshot of his second and
conclusive "scene of violence" with the mistress of his fortune,
when the dire terms of his release had had to be formally, and oh!
so abjectly, acceded to. She "compromised," the cruel brute, for Four
Hundred Pounds down--for not a farthing less would she stay her strength
from "proceedings." No jury in the land but would give her six, on the
nail ("Oh she knew quite where she was, thank you!") and he might feel
lucky to get off with so whole a skin. This was the sum, then, for which
he had grovellingly compounded--under an agreement sealed by a supreme
exchange of remarks.

"'Where in the name of lifelong ruin are you to _find_ Four Hundred?'"
Miss Cookham had mockingly repeated after him while he gasped as from
the twist of her grip on his collar. "That's _your_ look-out, and I
should have thought you'd have made sure you knew before you decided on
your base perfidy." And then she had mouthed and minced, with ever
so false a gentility, her consistent, her sickening conclusion. "Of
course--I may mention again--if you too distinctly object to the trouble
of looking, you know where to find _me_."

"I had rather starve to death than ever go within a mile of you!"
Herbert described himself as having sweetly answered; and that was
accordingly where _they_ devotedly but desperately were--he and she,
penniless Nan Drury. Her father, of Drury & Dean, was, like so far
too many other of the anxious characters who peered t