“I forgot the kids. Elsie--Gladys sleeps in your room doesn’t she?” “Yes,” said Elsie, suddenly flushing scarlet. He laughed abruptly, scanning her face with hungry eyes. “I’ll have a fire in the surgery. We’ll go down there. Florrie knows better than to put her foot inside it,” said Doctor Woolley significantly. V It was two days later. Florrie and Mrs. Woolley were talking in the kitchen. Elsie hung about in the diminutive passage, trying desperately to hear what they were saying. An awful intuition gripped her that they were talking of her. Florrie’s voice was indistinct, almost inaudible, but snatched phrases rose occasionally from the angry monotone that was Mrs. Woolley’s. “... My innocent children ... turn my back ... the gutter ... don’t you talk to me ... the gutter ... out of the gutter....” Elsie tried wildly to persuade herself that Mrs. Woolley was abusing Florrie. Sometimes she lost her temper with her servants, and shouted at them. On the evening that Mrs. Woolley had gone to see her friend Mrs. Williams, who was reported very ill, Elsie, in her best frock, had boldly gone into the surgery, where a fire blazed, and there was a sofa newly piled with cushions. On the table had been placed a bottle and glasses and a dish of biscuits. Doctor Woolley had locked the door behind her, in spite of Elsie’s half-meant protests, but at first he had been entirely jovial, using catch-phrases that had made her laugh, and drinking heartily. She herself had begun to feel rather affronted and puzzled at his aloofness, before it suddenly came to an end. The remembrance of her own surrender rather bewildered Elsie. She had never consciously made up her mind to it, but the doctor’s urgency, her own physical susceptibility, and an underlying, violent curiosity had proved far too strong for her feeble defences, based on timidity and on the recollection of certain unexplained, and less-than-half-understood, arbitrary axioms laid down during her childhood by her mother. She supposed that that one half-hour in the surgery had made “a bad girl” of her, but the aspect of the case that really preoccupied her was her terror that Mrs. Woolley should have found it out. She felt sick with fright as the kitchen door opened, and, turning round, pretended to be looking for something in the housemaid’s closet under the stairs. She heard Mrs. Woolley brush past her and go into the drawing-room, slamming the door violently behind her. Elsie, her knees shaking, went upstairs to fetch Gladys and Sonnie and take them to their kindergarten. She dawdled on the way back, being unwilling to go into the house again, and alternately hoping and dreading that the doctor would be at home for the midday meal. At one o’clock, however, Mrs. Woolley and Elsie sat down without him.