But yet her feet dragged her to the quarter, as to other quarters, and she talked to herself as she walked. She told herself that her husband did not understand her, and that it would be romantic and silencing did she take a lover to her arms; and she could have wept that, of all the flagrant splendours of which she dreamed, London's grey should remain her only share. And she knew that the attendants at the Imperial Institute had begun to look at her. Once she had spoken to one of them, but when she had thought of asking him whether he knew a Mr. Strong who came there to study Indian Art, her heart had suddenly failed her, and the question had stayed unspoken. Nevertheless she had feared that the man had guessed her thought, and must be taking stock of her face against some contingency (to visualize which passed the heavy time on) that had a Divorce Court in it, and hotel porters and chambermaids who gave evidence, and the Channel boat, and two forsaken children, and grimy raptures in the Latin Quarter, and its hectic cafés at night.... And so she walked, feeling herself special and strange and frightened and half-resolved; and thrice in as many weeks Lady Tasker, sitting with her crochet at her window, had seen her pass, but had not been able to believe that this was the woman, with a husband and children, on whom she had once called at that house with the secretive privet hedge away in Hampstead. * * * * * "It _is_ Amory!" Dorothy exclaimed. "Is she coming here?" Lady Tasker spoke reflectively.--"I don't know. I don't think so. But--will you fetch her in? I should like to see her." "If you like, auntie," said Dorothy, though a little reluctantly. But Lady Tasker seemed to change her mind. She laid down her crochet and rose. "No, never mind," she said. "I'll fetch her myself." And the old lady of seventy passed slowly out of the room, and Katie and Dorothy moved away from the window. Lady Tasker was back again in five minutes, but no Amory came with her. She walked back to her chair, moved it, and took up her work again.--"Switch the table light on," she said. "Was it Amory?" Dorothy ventured to ask after a silence. "Yes," Lady Tasker replied. "And wouldn't she come in?" "She said she was hurrying back home." That raised a question so plain that Dorothy thought it tactful to make rather a fuss about finding some album or other that should convince Katie that she really had met the Mollie who had written the letter about the window-curtains. Lady Tasker's needle was dancing rather more quickly than usual. Dorothy found her album, switched on another light, and told Katie to make room for her on her chair. Amory, dawdling like that, and then, when spoken to, to have the face to say that she was hurrying back home!---- It was some minutes later that Lady Tasker said off-handedly, "Has she any children besides those twins?" "Amory?" Dorothy replied, looking up from the album. "No."