Ingworth wished that he were not going away--leaving the field clear. . . . "Have a cigar, Dicker. No?--well, here's the very best of luck." "Thanks, the same to you!" END OF BOOK TWO BOOK THREE FRUIT OF THE DEAD SEA "Let thy fountain be blessed: and rejoice with the wife of thy youth." "Let her be as the loving hind and pleasant roe: let her breasts satisfy thee at all times: and be thou ravished always with her love." "And why wilt thou, my son, be ravished with a strange woman, and embrace the bosom of a stranger?" "_His own iniquities shall take the wicked himself, and he shall be holden with the cords of his sins._" CHAPTER I THE GIRLS IN THE FOURTH STORY FLAT "We were two daughters of one race; She was the fairest in the face;" --_Tennyson._ In the sitting room of a small forty-five pound flat, upon the fourth floor of a tall red-brick building in West Kensington known as Queens Mansions, Ethel Harrison, the girl who lived with Rita Wallace, sat sewing by the window. It was seven o'clock in the evening and though dusk was at hand there was still enough light to sew by. The flat, moreover, was on the west side of the building and caught the last rays of the sun as he sank to rest behind the quivering vapours of London. Last week in August as it was, the heat which hung over the metropolis for so long was in no way abated. All the oxygen was gone from the air, and for those who must stay in London--the workers, who could only read in the papers of translucent sunlit seas in Cornwall where one bathed from the beaches all day long; of bright northern moors where dew fell upon the heather at dawn--life was become stifling and hard. In the window hung a bird-cage and the canary within it--the pet of these two lonely maidens--drooped upon its perch. It was known as "The Lulu Bird" and was a recurring incident in their lives. Ethel was six and twenty, short, undistinguished of feature and with sandy hair. She was the daughter of a very poor clergyman in Lancashire, and she was the principal typist in the busy office of a firm of solicitors in the city. She had ever so many certificates for shorthand, was a quick and accurate machine-writer, understood the routine of an office in all its details, and was invaluable to her employers. They boasted of her, indeed, trusted her in every way, worked her from nine to six on normal days, to any hours of the night at times of pressure, and paid her the highest salary in the market. That is to say, that this girl was at the very top of her profession and received two pounds ten shillings a week. Dozens of girls envied her, she was more highly paid than most of the men clerks in the city. She knew herself to be a very fortunate girl. She gave high technical ability, a good intelligence, unceasing, unwearying and most loyal service for fifty shillings a week.