He stopped, as if seized by a new idea. “Did you tell them where you had been?” “No,” she replied, in the same weak voice. “But why not do so? There is hope in that. The chaplain was your friend--your only friend in London, so far as they know. Surely that is an extenuating circumstance so plausible----” “But I cannot----” “I know it is bitter to explain--to apologize--and if I can do it for you----” “I will not allow it!” she said. Her lips were set, and her breath was coming through them in gusts. “It is a pity to allow the hospitals to be closed against you. Nursing is a good profession, Glory--even a fashionable one. It is true womanly work, and----” “That was what he said.” “Who? John Storm? He was right. Indeed, he was an entirely honourable and upright man, and----” “But _you_ always seemed to say there were other things more worthy of a girl, and if she had a mind to---- But no matter. We needn't talk about the hospitals any longer. I am not fit for them and shall never go back to them, whatever happens.” He looked down at her. She was biting her lips, and the tears were gathering in her eyes. “Well, well, never mind, dear,” he said, and he patted her hand again. The moon had begun to wane, and out of the dark shadows they walked in they could see the lines of houses lit up all around. “Look,” she said, with a feeble laugh, “in all this great busy London is there nothing else I'm fit for?” “You are fit for anything in the world, my dear,” he answered. Her nerves were throbbing harder than ever. “Perhaps he doesn't remember,” she thought. Should she tell him what he said so often about her talents, and how much she might be able to make of them? “Is there nothing a girl can do except go down on her knees to a woman?” He laughed and talked some nonsense about the kneeling. “Poor little woman, she doesn't know what she is doing,” he thought. “I shouldn't mind what people thought of me,” she said, “not even my own people, who have been brought up with such narrow ideas, you know. They might think what they liked, if I felt I was in the right place at last--the right place for me, I mean.” Her nervous fingers were involuntarily clutching at his coat sleeve. “Now, any other man----” he thought. She began to cry. “He _won't_ remember,” she told herself. “It was only his way of being agreeable when he praised me and predicted such wonderful things. And now his good breeding will not allow him to tell me there are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of girls in London as likely to----” “Come, you mustn't cry, Glory. It's not so bad as that.” She had never seemed to him so beautiful, and he wanted to take her in his arms and comfort her. “I had no one but you to come to,” she murmured in her confusion. But she was thinking: “Why didn't you stop me before? Why have you let me go on all these months?” “I must try to think of something, and I'll speak to my friend Rosa--Miss Macquarrie, you know.”