Every now and then realisation came to her, when certain frightful words sprang into frightful meaning, as they had never done before. “Murder....” “Conspiracy ... and incitement to murder....” “Principal in the second degree....” The police officials had made use of that expression--so had Mr. Cleaver. Elsie’s mother had fetched Mr. Cleaver, and had wildly repeated, in front of Elsie and the lawyer, that she would grudge no expense, not if it cost her her last penny. “And the aunties will help, Elsie, they’ve been ever so good--anything we can get together, says your Aunt Gertie, and her face the colour of the tablecloth. Mr. Cleaver here will tell us the best man, if it--if it comes to--to....” “You could scarcely do better than Sir Cambourne Trevor, Mrs. Palmer, but his fee, I ought to warn you, is a thousand guineas.” “A thousand guineas!” Elsie and Mrs. Palmer had screamed together. And Mr. Cleaver, gaunt and haggard and grey-faced, had made answer: “It’s her life that will be at stake.” From time to time, Elsie understood. She knew, at those moments, what it all meant. There would be no more concealments, everything would be dragged out into a publicity that could only bring with it dishonour and shameful notoriety, and hatred, and execration. And she would have to live through it--to suffer through an ordeal of vast, incredible magnitude, of which the climax--she knew it in a prescience that mercifully could not endure--would come in the ghastly dawn of a prison-yard, beneath the shadow of the scaffold.... Inexorable results would be suffered by herself, and she would never know how it was that these things had become inevitable--had happened. _Dawlish_, 1923. THE BOND OF UNION THE BOND OF UNION (To A. P. D.) A wide, cushioned seat runs round three sides of the deep fireplace in Torry Delorian’s library for the admitted reason that Lady Pamela March likes to face the room when she is talking. The room, of course, means the audience. Personally, I consider that she could safely--I mean, without spoiling her picture of herself--make use of the very word itself. It is so obviously the only one that applies, when she sits there, smoking one cigarette after another, and we sit there, smoking one cigarette after another, all listening to Pamela, playing up to Pamela, and all more or less sexually attracted by Pamela. The subconscious mind of Pamela projects on these occasions, I think, something of this kind: =“_The girlish figure dominated the room. Magnetism vibrated in every gesture of the slim hands, every glance from the brilliant eyes, every modulation of the rather deep voice. She held them all, by sheer force of personality. The peacock-blue folds of her dress, with its girdle of barbaric, coloured stones...._”=