“Ah!” said Mrs. le Mentier; “and she’s really dropped out—one can’t do anything! All the time when she isn’t actually at that tiresome Stepney club of hers she’s contriving things for it—positively it amounts to a terror! She asked me last week to sing at a smoking concert for some factory hands. I told her I thought smoking concerts for those kind of people were simply immoral, and she actually flamed up and cried, ‘You sing for Captain Hurstly and his do-nothing friends, who can afford to amuse themselves, and you won’t sing for men whose daily life is a hell, and whose only amusements are unspeakably degrading!’ Of course I stopped her at once. I told her she should give them Bible lessons. She saw how silly she had been then, and laughed in that dear old way of hers, and said, ‘You always had such a lot of common sense, Edith!’ But you see she must be dropped. She’ll begin to talk about her soul next!” Her friend yawned. “Well, my dear,” she said, “don’t you get earnest too. That wretched Madame Veune is coming to fit me at three o’clock, so I must be off. Oh, by-the-bye, if Muriel should turn up to-morrow you might ask her to come and see me—I don’t know her slum address—one must do what one can, you know. Good-bye, dear.” And the two affectionately kissed and parted. Mrs. Huntly frowned as she drove home. Muriel Dallerton had been an old friend of hers, and she really meant to do what she could for her. CHAPTER II “The sky is not less blue because the blind man cannot see it.” MURIEL DALLERTON knelt on the floor of a small lodging-house room by the fire. It was with evident difficulty that she could make it burn at all, for the soot kept rolling down and the chimney threatened to smoke. She had not yet accustomed herself to black hands every time she touched the shovel. The worst of it was she expected her uncle and guardian to tea, and she had to confess to herself that the prospect was not pleasing. She had lived with her uncle ever since she had been an orphan at six years of age, and she had been sent to an expensive boarding-school and been finished in Paris. After three triumphant London seasons, every moment of which she had lived through with the same earnest delight that was one of her most striking characteristics, she had come to the conclusion that in some way or other she was wasting her life. She had for a whole year tried every way of doing good that was compatible with a house full of servants, a stable full of horses, and a social position. But at every turn she met with opposition—this, that, the other was “not nice”—not “the proper thing”—the horses couldn’t go out—what would the servants think—she was upsetting the whole house—people would begin to talk. She confessed herself lamentably deficient in the sense of what was the proper thing, and on her own side she felt she could no longer bear the strain of the double life.