In the dining-room Pauline stood for a long time looking down at her fingers that rested upon the tablecloth. The air was full of little noises--the clitter of milk-cans, the monotonous sound of water pulsing continuously from the mains, the voices of two nurses as they wheeled their charges home from the Park. The door-bell rang, but no one disturbed her. With the light falling on her hair, absolutely motionless, she looked down at her fingers on the white cloth and smiled faintly. II IN the long, dark room where Dudley Leicester still sprawled in his deep chair, Katya stopped Robert Grimshaw near the door. “I’ll ask him to ask you his question,” she said, “and you’ll answer it in as loud a voice as you can. That’ll cure him. You’ll see. I don’t suppose you expected to see me here.” “I didn’t expect it,” he answered, “but I know why you have come.” “Well,” she said, “if he isn’t cured, you’ll be hanging round him for ever.” “Yes, I suppose I shall be hanging round him for ever,” he answered. “And more than that, you’ll be worrying yourself to death over it. I can’t bear you to worry, Toto,” she said. She paused for a long minute and then she scrutinized him closely. “So it was you who rang him up on the telephone?” she said. “I thought it was, from the beginning.” “Oh, don’t let’s talk about that any more,” Grimshaw said; “I’m very tired; I’m very lonely. I’ve discovered that there are things one can’t do--that I’m not the man I thought I was. It’s you who are strong and get what you want, and I’m only a meddler who muddles and spoils. That’s the moral of the whole thing. Take me on your own terms and make what you can of me. I am too lonely to go on alone any more. I’ve come to give myself up. I went down to Brighton to give myself up to you on condition that you cured Dudley Leicester. Now I just do it without any conditions whatever.” She looked at him a little ironically, a little tenderly. “Oh, well, my dear,” she said, “we’ll talk about that when he’s cured. Now come.” She made him stand just before Leicester’s sprawled-out feet, and going round behind the chair, resting her hands already on Leicester’s hair in preparation for bending down to make, near his ear, the suggestion that he should put his question, she looked up at Robert Grimshaw.