There was not much money left when the funeral expenses had been paid and Nancy had bought her mourning—those poor black suits of woe that in their utter inadequacy even to symbolise still less to express her grief seemed like an insult to the beloved dead. It was a desperate challenge to fortune to abandon the Greenwich engagement. But Nancy could not bring herself to the point of returning to the cast of the pantomime. That was beyond the compass of her emotional endurance. The management offered her a larger salary to play the Fairy Queen only, without appearing as Columbine; but she refused. The Employers’ Liability Act did not exist at this date; and when the management suggested, as a reason for not paying her direct compensation, that the accident had already cost them dearly enough in the gloom it had shed over what promised to be a really successful production, Nancy’s grief would not allow her even to comment on such a point of view. Bram was dead. People told her that she had a good case against the theatre. But Bram was dead. He was dead. He was dead. All she wanted was to leave Greenwich for ever, and when Mrs. Pottage offered her hospitality she refused. “It’s not pride, dear Mrs. Pottage, that prevents my staying on with you. You mustn’t think that. It’s simply that I could not bear to go on living alone where he and I lived together. I’m sure to find an engagement presently. I have enough money left to keep Letizia and myself for quite a little time.” “Well, don’t let’s lose sight of each other for good and all,” said the landlady. “Let’s meet some day and go down to Margate together and have a nice sea blow. I’ve got a friend down there—well, friend, I say, though she’s a relation really, but she is a friend for all that, a good friend—well, this Sarah Williams has a very natty little house looking out on the front, and we could spend a nice time with her when she’s not full up with lodgers. I’d say ‘come down now,’ but Margate in January’s a bit like living in a house with the windows blown out and the doors blown in and the roof blown off and the walls blown down.” So, Nancy left Starboard Alley and went to live in rooms in Soho, perhaps in the very same house where more than a century ago Letizia’s great-great-grandmother had been left with that cageful of love-birds and the twenty pairs of silk stockings.