“He detests you,” Lady Mallowe went on. “He will not hear of your living with us--or even near us. He says you are old enough to take care of yourself. Take my advice. I am doing you a good turn in giving it. This New York newsboy is mad over you. If he hadn’t been we should have been bundled out of the house before this. He never has spoken to a lady before in his life, and he feels as if you were a goddess. Go into the billiard-room this instant, and do all a woman can. Go!” And she actually stamped her foot on the carpet. “You might live in the very house you would have lived in with Jem Temple Barholm, on the income he could have given you.” She saw the crassness of her blunder the next moment. If she had had an advantage, she had lost it. Wickedly, without a touch of mirth, Joan laughed in her face. “Jem’s house and Jem’s money--and the New York newsboy in his shoes,” she flung at her. “T. Tembarom to live with until one’s death-bed. T. Tembarom!” Suddenly, something _was_ giving way in her, Lady Mallowe thought again. Joan slipped into a chair and dropped her head and hidden face on the table. “Oh! Mother! Mother!” she ended. “Oh! Jem! Jem!” Was she sobbing or trying to choke sobbing back? There was no time to be lost. Her mother had never known a scene to end in this way before. “Crying!” There was absolute spite in her voice. “That shows you know what you are in for, at all events. But I’ve said my last word. What does it matter to me, after all? You’re in the trap. I’m not. Get out as best you can.” She turned her back and went out of the room--as she had come into it--with a sweep Joan would have smiled at as rather vulgar if she had seen it. As a child in the nursery, she had often seen that her ladyship was vulgar. But she did not see the sweep because her face was hidden. Something in her had broken this time, as her mother had felt. That bitter, sordid truth, driven home as it had been, had done it. Who had time to remember denials, or lies proved to be lies? Nobody in the world. Who had time to give to the defense of a dead man? There was not time enough to give to living ones. It was true--true! When a man is dead, it is too late. The wall had built itself until it reached her sky; but it was not the wall she bent her head and sobbed over. It was that suddenly she had seen again Jem’s face as he had stood with slow-growing pallor, and looked round at the ring of eyes which stared at him; Jem’s face as he strode by her without a glance and went out of the room. She forgot everything else on earth. She forgot where she was. She was eighteen again, and she sobbed in her arms as eighteen sobs when its heart is torn from it. “Oh, Jem! Jem!” she cried. “If you were only in the same _world_ with me! If you were just in the same _world_!”