At last the welcome jar and creak of the gate awoke her. "Why, I thought you knew I had to go to the Borough!" began a fretful voice, forestalling reproach, and a buxom woman resplendent with black satin and much jewellery came up the tiny garden-path. "It doesn't matter, mother--I haven't been waiting long." "Well, you know how difficult it is to get a 'bus in this weather--at least if you want to sit outside, and it always makes my head ache frightfully to go inside--I'm not strong and young like you--and such a long way, I had to change at the Bank, and I made sure you'd get something to eat at one of the girls', and go straight to the People's Palace." Still muttering, Mrs. Brill produced a key, and after some fumbling threw open the door. Both made a step within, then both stopped, aghast. "It's the wrong house," thought Salvina confusedly, conscious of her power of making such mistakes. "_Kisshuf_ (witchcraft)!" whispered her mother, terrified into her native idiom. The passage lay before them, entirely bare of all its familiar colour and furniture: the framed engravings depicting the trials of William Lord Russell, in the Old Bailey, and Earl Stafford in Westminster Hall, the flower-pots on the hall table, the proudly purchased hat-rack, the metal umbrella-stand, all gone! And beyond, facing them, lay the parlour, an equally forlorn vacancy striking like a blast of chilly wind through its wide-open door. "Thieves!" cried Mrs. Brill, reverting from the supernatural and the Yiddish. "Murder! I'm ruined! They've stolen my house!" "Hush! Hush!" said Salvina, strung to calm by her mother's incoherence. "Let us see first what has really happened." "Happened! Haven't you got eyes in your head? All the fruit of my years of toil!" And Mrs. Brill wrung her jewelled hands. "Your father would have me call on those Sperlings, though I told him they'd be glad to dance on my tomb. And why didn't Lazarus stay at home?" "You know he has to be out looking for work." "And my gilt clock that I trembled even to wind up, and the big vase with the picture on it, and my antimacassars, and my beautiful couch that nobody had ever sat upon! Oh my God, oh my God!" Leaving her mother moaning out a complete inventory in the passage, Salvina advanced into the violated parlour. It was an aching void. On the bare mantelpiece, just where the gilt clock had announced a perpetual half-past two, gleamed an unstamped letter. She took it up wonderingly. It was in her father's schoolboyish hand, addressed to her mother. She opened it, as usual, for Mrs. Brill did not even know the alphabet, and refused steadily to make its acquaintance, to the ironic humiliation of the Board School teacher. "You would not let me give you _Get_," [ran the letter abruptly], "so you have only yourself to blame. I have left the clothes in the bed-rooms, but what is mine is mine. Good-bye. "MICHAEL BRILL.