Mrs. Conifer was sometimes dull, so dull that she used to go to a cake shop and have her afternoon tea and listen to the other women’s chatter. Here was an opportunity that Kinsman could not miss. Before long she went to his rooms instead of going to the cake shop. It was really much more amusing. The Inn is quiet in the afternoons. A great many of the fellows are in the City, and the laundresses have gone away for the day. Mrs. Conifer used to thread her way through quiet by-ways--down Guilford Street, along monastic Great James Street, across Theobalds Road, and onwards. The gardens were quiet in those days; we did not allow children in until evening. It was so beautifully fresh and still after the roar and dust of outside London, the summer smells of provision shops, and the rattle of omnibuses. Kinsman had shaded windows--it was summer time at first--and a dainty tea. He liked her to come in the afternoons because Sophia Dominy, of whom he was a little afraid, was safely shut away in the big mantle shop where she was dummy. But by and by Mrs. Conifer came in the evenings also--after dinner, when Conifer had shut himself up for the evening in his study. She used to drive up to the gates on wet nights. I saw her more than once myself--always beautifully dressed and closely veiled, and having that intangible air of shrinking which is natural to the woman who never goes out alone after dark. And then one night she met Sophia Dominy in the doorway. It was bound to happen. Sophia was a handsome girl with a fine figure--I told you she was dummy at a mantle shop. She came out of the shadow of the doorway as Mrs. Conifer drew into it. It so happened that Kinsman was late home that night; his windows were dark. Mrs. Conifer looked. With her quick woman’s eye she took in every detail of this other woman, whose clothes were a pitiful struggle for costly effect--seal plush instead of sealskin, weedy ostrich plumes in her hat, and in her small ears the glitter of red glass. There must have been insolent contempt in her china-blue eyes, for Sophia’s great black ones began to blaze, and she put her hand on the other’s slim, nervous shoulder. She said, with an offensive touch of comradeship: “Good-evening, Mrs. Conifer.” How did she find out? How do women learn these things? _You_ can say perhaps--_I_ give it up. I only know that Kinsman had been very careful--as careful as a man knows how. Little blond Mrs. Conifer started, and then stared coldly at the gaudy, tawdry, dark creature in the doorway. “I--I don’t understand,” she faltered; “I--excuse me--I do not know you.” She made a weak attempt at dignity, but she looked horribly ashamed and alarmed. She was afraid that the girl knew everything and was going to blackmail her.