Something surged up to his lips in the silence of the next few minutes, and he held his breath and tightened his grasp on the cold fingers before he said it. Then she pulled away her hand almost roughly, and spoke quickly. "Do you know it is nearly eleven? Norah had a bad night with the baby last night, and you look awfully tired too. Hadn't you better be moving?" So he did not say it after all. "You have not told me what you think yet. I suppose you are only laughing at me," she said, when he bade her good-bye. He found himself smiling in a conventional manner; he could not have said why. "Oh, no, why should I? I think it is very wise of you," he said, opening the door to go out; "and when I tell Norah she will say 'Just like Joan!' Good-night." And she answered down the stairs after him, "Good-night, and mind you tell Norah all about it!" "I'll be hanged if I do," thought the musician, as he walked down the drive; and he congratulated himself all the way back on not having made a fool of himself. "I'm sure I hope he won't," added Lady Joan to herself out loud, as the front-door banged. Then she walked unsteadily into her boudoir, and made up the fire, and sat down on the sofa, and looked dully into the flames. And presently she turned and hid her face in the cushions, and burst into tears. CHAPTER IX. Lady Joan went up to her town house at the end of the summer, but her philanthropic campaign was not a success. The field of philanthropy was overcrowded just then with people like herself, who had too little wealth and too much energy to be of any practical use to the great organizers of charity, who never wanted anything from their devotees but subscriptions and obedience; a reformer does not want to be interfered with by a penniless nobody who has independent views concerning his method of reform. And Lady Joan soon found that she was not in a set that troubled itself much about the suffering poor. The people she met in Digby's studio were mostly theoretical Socialists, who complained that the cause of Socialism was being ruined by the enthusiasts who tried to make it work before its principles had been properly disseminated among the people; and amongst her other friends were some who had a small and private charity of their own, but were so jealous of it when they had that she found it impossible to work with them; or else they were quite willing to use her house and her carriage and her time, if she would meekly give them all these without being allowed a voice in the arrangements or a particle of credit for what she did. And she found that as much sweating went on in the administration of charity as its administrators were in the habit of exposing in the slums; she met jaded gentlewomen in the employ of philanthropists, who spent their lives in addressing envelopes at something less than the market price, and footsore secretaries who walked the slums to verify the abuses which