“Lunch here, can you? One o’clock. And meanwhile, darling, I’m going to think hard what I can do to make things better for you. He’s got to stop leading you this sort of life, anyway, and it’s up to me to find a way of making him do so. When I think of his knocking you about....” The blood rushed into his face, and Elsie saw that he had clenched his hand involuntarily. It was balm to her to realise that she still had the power of exciting him to a frenzied anxiety on her account. “He’s hit me before now, you know,” she said suddenly, hardly realising, and caring not at all, that she was not speaking the truth. “You never told me. I’ve sometimes wondered....” “I didn’t mean to say anything about it. I knew it would upset you.... Never mind, darling, I don’t care.” “But I do. I tell you it’s driving me mad. Oh, what’s the good of talking when one can’t do anything! Look here, darling, I’m not fit to talk to you now--and besides, you’ll be frightfully late. I shall see you to-morrow.” “One o’clock. Good-night, sweetheart. I wish it was you and me going to this show to-night. Wouldn’t it be heaven!” “Indeed it would. But things may come right for us even yet, darling--don’t give up hope. Good-bye.” “Good-bye!” she echoed. Elsie was late for her appointment with her husband, but he did not complain. He seemed anxious to do everything in his power to conciliate her, and it was characteristic of their relations together that, as her fear of his sarcastic petulance vanished, so her contempt for him increased. “I got dress-circle places,” said Williams impressively. “I know you like them.” The piece, a musical comedy, amused her, and she was pleased at various glances that were cast upon her by their neighbours in the theatre. At the back of it all was a warm inward glow that pervaded all her consciousness at the remembrance of Leslie Morrison’s championship of her, his assurance that he would “think out a way.” Perhaps Leslie would make up his mind to take her away. She had asked him to do so, and he had always refused. Elsie, with an ever-latent fear that Morrison was already beginning to tire of an attachment that to her was the one reality in life, told herself passionately that, with him, she would care nothing for poverty. “It’s good, isn’t it?” said her husband’s nasal voice. “Rather. Topping!” For a minute or two she listened to the comedian on the stage, and was genuinely amused by his facial contortions and wilful mispronunciations of polysyllabic words. “He’s so silly, you can’t help laughing at him,” Elsie declared, wiping her eyes. Then she drifted back again into the dream wherein she and Leslie Morrison figured as sole protagonists, with complete and unexplained elimination of Horace Williams. “Look who’s here, Elsie!” She started violently, convinced against all reason that she would see Morrison. “Isn’t that your aunties?” “So it is,” said Elsie without enthusiasm.