What should she do when dawn came? She tried to be cool, practical. She had always been practical; women who earn their own bread are compelled to be. She walked on very quickly. The streets were almost empty. She met with no annoyance. Yet she felt that this was the measure of her degradation--this night alone under the London stars. What should she do? She knew what she wanted to do. Go back; ignore everything. Yes, she wanted that. She kept lashing herself with fierce self-reproach. She called herself shameless, spiritless, vicious. But she couldn’t help it. She wanted to go back--to breakfast with him as usual, to say nothing. She loved him. That terrible cankering love! Would nothing destroy it? At Sloane Street she turned down, making her way instinctively, like all hopeless, desolate creatures, to the river. She walked along and along, not noticing distance, not feeling the soreness of her lightly-shod feet, until she came to Chelsea. She crossed the road and walked closely by the houses in Cheyne Walk. She went by Oakley Street, by Cheyne Row, by the red blocks of flats beyond, and by the Hospital, where lights still burned in certain windows. At the corner of Beaufort Street she stopped. What on earth was the good of going on? A quick, frightened feminine cry, a hoarse curse from a man, startled her, and she stumbled to the pavement, conscious all in a moment that a hansom had nearly knocked her down. It stopped at a house with a heavy door painted white. As she stood there by the railings, unsteady, uncertain, a woman jumped from the hansom and opened the gate of that house. She had a long cloak too. Beneath it hung a soft mass of black net which flashed with steel. Their eyes met; the eyes of these two women on the pavement. The hansom rattled off. The lights in the house, except one on the ground floor, were out. The pavements wound away, wet and empty. Their eyes met. Pamela forced a smile, put out her hand in a conventional way. “Is it really Mrs. Clutton?” she said, with an artificial accent, as if it were broad day and Bond Street. “Pamela! Pamela! Really? But what are you doing alone? Where is Mr. Jayne?” The little dark, vivacious woman’s eyes contracted as they rested on this wild figure with the wretched, haggard face, the clown-like smile. Pamela said nothing. She began to cry in a low, terrified fashion, like a lost child. The other took her by the shoulder and led her up the flagged path to the door. CHAPTER XVIII. SHE opened the wide door into a hall which blazed with a yellow carpet and led the way into a room which was lighted with a shaded reading-lamp. The room instantly appealed to Pamela with a sense of dear familiarity. It was filled with furniture and china from the Buttery. “Sit down. It is Mrs. Nick Hone’s chair. She used to stand her washing-tub on it; Tim says it is worth five pounds.”