“It’s a good goer, an’ I’ve allus liked a chain better’n a cord.” “Let’s take the 2.45, old man,” said Jimmy. “I’d like to look in at the Royal in the evening. They’ve got that big girl there--Lilian--what’s her name? The girl who sings Irish song’s so well.” The fierce summer sun had gone to bed. All the night sounds were beginning--beetles, frogs, birds. The nightingale that Jimmy so hated was tuning up on a hedge near. “Shan’t get a wink of sleep to-night,” he said dolefully, with his hard, painful cough. “Give me the cabs for a lullaby.” Jib and Zak were coming slowly downstairs. I heard them shut her door. I could imagine her: the sheet over her hard face, the clock, to whose regularity she had given her last breath, keeping her sedate company. AN INTERLUDE. IT was only Mrs. Conifer. Thought the woman would never go! Poor soul! What a curse a conscience is. She was a fool to come back! Said she couldn’t help it! She loathes the very memory of Kinsman--she adores her husband--and yet she comes back to-night. That is so deliciously like a woman--to come back. To come creeping through the gate, dodging the porter, like she used to do, just to get the flavor of those old, distasteful days on her tongue again. Kinsman had the ground floor at No. 7. A middle-aged couple rent it now; the wife watches everyone in and out of the Inn through a pair of opera glasses. In Kinsman’s time there were high-art curtains--very dingy--at the windows and tumbled red-and-white dhurries on the floor and blue plates hung by wire along the walls. He was a languid, artistic chap--played the violin, hung about old bookstalls and _bric-à-brac_ shops in the lanes off Holborn. He very rarely went to a music hall, avoided rowdy parties, dined out a great deal in the season, and spoke now and then, in an off-hand, half-ashamed way, of his people near Park Lane. There were photographs of society beauties on his mantelshelf, propped up against Oriental bowls--“pudden basins,” his laundress dubbed them scornfully--he gave you to understand that he knew all the beauties personally. He visited the Conifers, who had a big dingy house in Russell Square. Conifer was a stockbroker, very much absorbed in his business, and Mrs. Conifer was an extremely pretty blonde in the china-doll style. She was the kind of little woman who is called “dressy” by her friends.