ndled most of the garments on to the bed and
wheeled forward the armchair for Mabel to sit in.

"I never can keep tidy," she acknowledged. "It used to make Joan fair
sick when we shared rooms on tour. Joan is so different from me."
Suddenly she threw aside pretence and dropped down on her knees before
the armchair, squatting back on her heels to look at Mabel. "That is
what I do want you to understand," she said, earnestly. "Joan is as
different to me as soap to dirt. She is a lady, you probably saw that; I
am not. She is good; I don't suppose I ever have been. She is clean all
through, and she loves your brother so much that she wanted to break her
heart to keep him happy." She looked down at her hands for a second,
then up again quickly. "I'll tell you, it won't do any harm. Mind you,
usually, I say a secret is a secret though I mayn't look the sort that
can keep one. Joan told me about it at the beginning when I chaffed her
about his loving her; and he does, you know he does. It seems that when
she first came to London she had funny ideas in her head--innocent, I
should call it, and sort of inclined to trust men--anyway, she lived
with some man and there was to have been a baby," she brought the
information out with a sort of gasp.

"I knew that," Mabel answered, "and because of it I tried to persuade my
brother not to marry her."

"I suppose it is only natural you should," Fanny admitted, "though to me
it seems that when a woman has a baby like that, she pays for all the
fun that went before." She threw back her head a little and laughed.
"Oh, I'm not moral, I know that, but Joan is, that's what I want you to
understand. Anyway, Joan left the man, or he left her, which is more
likely, and the baby was never born. Joan was run over in the street one
day and was ill in hospital for a month. That was what Joan came up
against," she went on, "when she fell in love with your brother. Tell
him, I said, it won't make a pin's worth of difference to his love--and
it wouldn't. But Joan did not believe me, she had learned to be afraid
of good people, some of them had been real nasty to her, and she was
afraid."

"She need not have been," Mabel said. The girl was so earnest in the
defence of her friend that one could not help liking her. "Dick knew
about it all the time."

Fanny nodded. "Yes, Joan told me that on the day after he had been here.
It would have been fairer if he had said so from the beginning. You
see," she