"I am going to-night, mother. I told father I would stay until to-morrow, but he said I had better go to-night." Mrs. Folyat covered her face with her handkerchief. Tears she knew were unanswerable, but she did not anticipate that Annette would make no attempt to carry the discussion farther. When she removed her handkerchief Annette was gone and Serge was sitting quietly unwinding her skein of wool. "Serge! Serge!" she said. "Yes, mother." "Has she gone?" "Yes, mother." He turned and looked at her, and under his steady gaze she was silenced. She brought her spectacles down on to her nose, took up her knitting and went on with it. Every now and then she sniffed. Serge wound the new skein of wool into a ball and placed it in the basket by her side. He waited for a moment to see if she had anything to say. She only sniffed. Every line in her figure expressed a perfect wallowing in self-pity. He left her to it. * * * In the street Francis, still clinging to Bennett's arm, ended his homily thus: "Marriage, of course, is a blessed condition, and man was not meant to live alone. You will get into difficulties; everybody does. You will look for help; everybody does.--But don't let it become a habit." He had a great deal more to say, but just as, for the fourteenth time, they came opposite the house, the door opened and Serge and Annette came out, he carrying her luggage, a small trunk. In her hands she had two hats of straw, very high in the crown and very small in the brim. Bennett left his father-in-law and rushed over to her. "Excuse me," he said to Serge, and took Annette's trunk from him. Annette laid her hand in his arm and they walked off up the street in the direction of a cab-rank in the main Burdley Road. Francis joined Serge and they followed close behind. "And to think," said Francis, "that Annette should be the first to go, and that she should go like this! . . . What do you, make of it, Serge?" "It would be funny," replied Serge, "if it were not so pathetic." "Just . . . just what I have been feeling. Look at them! They look as if they were going off to an evening's merry-making." "They have forgotten us already." That was true. The lovers walked fast, hailed a cab on the rank, and had climbed in to it and were off by the time Serge and Francis came up with them. Serge bawled to the driver, the cab stopped, and Annette, conscience-stricken, jumped down and came quickly to her father. Francis drew a ring from his finger, a gold ring set with an emerald, and said: "I couldn't let you go without my present." "I'm not going far, father." "No, my dear, but it is for ever." Serge went to Bennett in the cab, shook hands with him, and said: "You're doing a bigger thing than you know." Bennett wrung Serge's hand, and could find no better expression of his very real emotion than this: "You're my brother now, you know." Annette came up, kissed Serge, and was promised her finished portrait for a wedding present.