d pipe and the comfort of
those carpet slippers she saw behind the coal-box. But at last she
took up the tongs, saying to herself sourly:

"It's for Marie, after all, because she asked me; not for him."

She chose her lumps of coal carefully, the two biggest, heavy enough
to crush out altogether the tiny glow of the embers which remained;
she battened them down and remained to assure herself that they would
not burn.

"He won't be able to say the fire wasn't made up," she thought.

She placed Osborn's carpet slippers carefully in front of it.

"He can't say he wasn't made comfortable when he came in."

She went out, with a small sense of satisfaction, and called softly
along the corridor, "Good night, babies," before she left the flat. It
was very, very cold, and she was more than ready for her own bed.

She travelled homewards upon the Tube.

Before she slept, however, Julia had a letter to write, to Desmond
Rokeby; she addressed it to his business address, which she happened
to know, and marked it _Very urgent_. The contents were as urgent
as the instruction upon the envelope, and once again that night she
left the Ladies' Club to post the letter at the pillar-box at the
corner. It would be cleared at midnight, and Rokeby should get his
news by the first post in the morning.

Then Julia Winter slept; but although her head was full of two babies,
a grown-girl one and a tiny weakling one, together in a soiled pink
room, it was not of them that she dreamed. She was sitting once more
at a balcony table in the quiet red restaurant with the big mirrors,
facing an unusual kind of man who cared as little what she thought of
him as she cared what he thought of her; the restaurant was warm and
rosy, and they drifted upon the flying hours, like two voyagers upon a
happy river.

CHAPTER XII

BEHIND THE VEIL

Marie heard Osborn come in and go to the dining-room and hit an
unresponsive mass of coal vigorously, but she gave no sign. In the
darkness she listened for all the sounds she had learned to know so
well; his movements in the dressing-room, his splashing as he washed
face and hands in the bathroom, his pat-pat tread in carpet slippers
along the corridor to their door. To-night he paused here, as if
listening; and it seemed as if her heart paused, too, while she also
listened for him. But he spoke no word, and she spoke none, and the
baby slept, so presently she heard the cautious turning of the handle