"Still you'll come and see me often, very often, till I settle down into the running? It will be beastly heavy going--must be, I'm afraid--for a long while yet." Dominic Iglesias, holding her hand, bent low and kissed it. "I will serve you perfectly, God helping me, as long as I live," he said. Five minutes later Mrs. Porcher, supported by the outraged and sympathetic Eliza, watched, through the aperture afforded by the rising hinge of the dining-room door, an unknown lady, escorted by Mr. Iglesias, sweep in whispering skirts and costly sables across the hall. Passing out and down the white steps, Poppy, usually so light of foot and deft of movement, stumbled, and but for Iglesias' prompt assistance would have fallen headlong. At that same moment de Courcy Smyth, slovenly in dress, with shuffling footsteps, crossed the road, and then slunk aside, his arm jerked up queerly almost as though warding off a blow. "No, no, I'm not hurt, not in the least hurt," Poppy said breathlessly, in response to Iglesias' inquiry. "But it's given me a bad fright. I'll go straight home. Put me into the first hansom you see.--No, I'll go by myself. I'd far rather. I give you my word I'm not hurt; but I've a lot of things to think about--I want to be alone. I want to be quiet. Come soon. I was very happy. Good-bye--good-night." CHAPTER XXVI A featureless landscape of the brand of ugliness peculiar to the purlicus of a great city, to that intermediate region where the streets have ended and the country has not yet fairly begun. A waste of cabbagefields--the dark lumpy earth between the rows of yellowish stumps strewn with ill-smelling refuse of decaying leaves--seen through the rents in a broken, unkempt, quickset hedge. Running parallel with the said hedge, shiny blacktarred palings, shutting off all view of the river. Between these barriers, a long stretch of drab-coloured high road, flanked by slightly raised footpaths, a verge of coarse weedy grass to them in which a litter of rags, torn posters, and much other unloveliness found harbourage. To the northwest and north, a sky piled to the zenith with mountainous swiftly moving clouds, inky, blue-purple, wildly white, from out the torn bosoms of which rushed, now and again, flurrying showers of hail and sleet driven by a shrieking wind. March was in the act of asserting its proverbial privilege of "going out like a lion"; but the lion, as seen in this particular perspective, was a frankly ignoble and ill-conditioned beast.