"Vy, _yes_! Ven Evie came here. Evie and Kitty and me, though vy I have Kitty here at all I don't know, seeing she makes slips in her work, and Mr Schmerveloff grumbles, and the other girls has it all to do over again----" And the torrent continued. I don't know what else she said; the rest didn't matter. Why it didn't matter you will see when I tell you that the tongue of a dead young libertine once, years before, had made free with Louie Causton's name and my own, and that the abominable slander, which had lasted for some days, had turned on nothing less than the paternity of Louie's child. All at the Business College, including Evie, had known of it; they had known, too, of the public apology I had been prompt to exact; but that mattered nothing, nothing, nothing now. This wretched little Israelite, revelling in her "v's," and even touching my sleeve from time to time, had seen to that. What the filthy rest was I do not know. Doubtless, beginning with that, and with the feeble Kitty to support her, she had made a complete history of jealousy.... And she did not even triumph openly. She lisped and protested, and put all on Kitty.... I left her, and almost fled from Louie also when, returning to Pall Mall, I encountered her coming out of Whitlock's room. And now I have sat since lunch wondering what is to be done next. The afternoon hours have brought me no more light then those of the night did. Dully, I liken my life to that Maze at Hampton Court in which, one happy Sunday I don't know how long ago, Evie and I spent an hour. As then I seem to see Miss Levey's flamingo red behind the green hedges; she seems to lurk in my life, too wary to confront me, too malicious not to scratch. I am lost in winding intricacies. True, there is a door, even as there is a door at Hampton Court that is opened when the labyrinth is to be emptied. I find myself brought up against this door time after time, but I do not know what lies beyond it. You see what the door is: it is to tell Evie everything--everything.... Too wonderful Louie! Why, if you foresaw all this, did you not _make_ me tell her--thrust me into a closet with her and keep the door until it was done--instead of letting me grope in my blindness and slip ever further and further away from her?... Oh, I am tired, tired. I am too tired even to be angry for my poor practised-upon darling. For they have sprung this horrible thing upon her. Half the time she does not, cannot, believe it; of the other half of her life they have made a torment. Poor lamb! Of course if they are cruel enough they can make it seem plausible to her; I only wonder that, harrowed as she must have been for all these weeks, she has borne up at all. _I_ know the horror she must have wrestled with!... That _that_ wicked old story should crop up again!... But I must stop. Perhaps an hour's sleep will do me good.