Bewildered, she looked at him for a moment, and then glanced at Jimmy as if for permission; he slowly bowed his head. "I am Mr. Larrance's wife," she said. Jimmy put up a hand quickly as Ashby Feak would have spoken. "It's quite true; you need not say anything, and I am not going to explain. This leaves you free of course; I will write a letter to-night, putting myself right in that quarter. Good night!" Ashby Feak, with a nod and a shrug of the shoulders, went out; they heard the door slam behind him. Jimmy moved slowly across to the window, without looking at Moira at all; she was watching him intently. After a pause, in which it seemed that they could hear their very hearts beat, she whispered a question: "Jimmy--is there someone else?" He did not reply. "Someone else you love, I mean?" He did not look round at her; he stared down into the dark street below. Across it a man was going hurriedly, and he was going in one direction--straight to Alice. "Yes," he said at last, in a heavy tone--"there is someone else." CHAPTER IV THE LONG NIGHT Much in the fashion of a bear that has hibernated through a long winter, and has come out lean and hungry into the warmth and brightness of the new summer--so Anthony Ditchburn crawled out of his mean lodging one sunny morning, and looked about him. He was a frowsy, unwholesome-looking bear at the best, and he blinked at the sunshine, basking a little in it with some faint show of pleasure, and facing life again with some show of hope. Exactly how he had lived during the winter he did not know; it had been a matter of crouching over fires in mean kitchens of lodging houses--sometimes cooking poor food for himself, and sometimes begging it, already cooked, from others; a mean, scraping, starveling existence, going on from day to day. Some part of it had been spent in an infirmary, where he had given much trouble, and had lectured the doctors and nurses cantankerously about his own case and his own symptoms; they had been rather glad to get rid of him. Now, with the sun warming his veins, and putting some strength into his shrunken limbs, he cast about in his mind for someone to whom he could appeal. A pathetic letter from him had reached Patience in the country; the old woman had been careful to reply, although, somewhat to his disgust, she had merely expressed sorrow for his difficulties, but had sent no money. Finding the letter now, after searching his pockets carefully, he discovered that the address of the place was a comparatively short distance from London; and, the country appealing to him on this bright day, and the chance of free lodging appealing even more strongly, he determined to make his way there. The shiftless life he had led had taught him to make the most of small opportunities; he knew that he might count on a lift in a cart now and then, and might even beg a little on the way, so low had he sunk.