The breach between Palmer and Christine was steadily widening. She was too proud to ask him to spend more of his evenings with her. On those occasions when he voluntarily stayed at home with her, he was so discontented that he drove her almost to distraction. Although she was convinced that he was seeing nothing of the girl who had been with him the night of the accident, she did not trust him. Not that girl, perhaps, but there were others. There would always be others. Into Christine's little parlor, then, K. turned, the evening after he had seen Tillie. She was reading by the lamp, and the door into the hall stood open. “Come in,” she said, as he hesitated in the doorway. “I am frightfully dusty.” “There's a brush in the drawer of the hat-rack--although I don't really mind how you look.” The little room always cheered K. Its warmth and light appealed to his aesthetic sense; after the bareness of his bedroom, it spelled luxury. And perhaps, to be entirely frank, there was more than physical comfort and satisfaction in the evenings he spent in Christine's firelit parlor. He was entirely masculine, and her evident pleasure in his society gratified him. He had fallen into a way of thinking of himself as a sort of older brother to all the world because he was a sort of older brother to Sidney. The evenings with her did something to reinstate him in his own self-esteem. It was subtle, psychological, but also it was very human. “Come and sit down,” said Christine. “Here's a chair, and here are cigarettes and there are matches. Now!” But, for once, K. declined the chair. He stood in front of the fireplace and looked down at her, his head bent slightly to one side. “I wonder if you would like to do a very kind thing,” he said unexpectedly. “Make you coffee?” “Something much more trouble and not so pleasant.” Christine glanced up at him. When she was with him, when his steady eyes looked down at her, small affectations fell away. She was more genuine with K. than with anyone else, even herself. “Tell me what it is, or shall I promise first?” “I want you to promise just one thing: to keep a secret.” “Yours?” Christine was not over-intelligent, perhaps, but she was shrewd. That Le Moyne's past held a secret she had felt from the beginning. She sat up with eager curiosity. “No, not mine. Is it a promise?” “Of course.” “I've found Tillie, Christine. I want you to go out to see her.” Christine's red lips parted. The Street did not go out to see women in Tillie's situation. “But, K.!” she protested. “She needs another woman just now. She's going to have a child, Christine; and she has had no one to talk to but her hus--but Mr. Schwitter and myself. She is depressed and not very well.” “But what shall I say to her? I'd really rather not go, K. Not,” she hastened to set herself right in his eyes--“not that I feel any unwillingness to see her. I know you understand that. But--what in the world shall I say to her?”