“It must be a tar’ble trial to have a man lik that,” said Ivy. “He’ll cost you a dunnamany shilluns and pounds if you’ve got to go trapesing after him everywheres, to tell folk he’s wed.” Mrs. Seagrim smiled. When Ivy had shown her out of the front-door, she would have liked to escape to her bedroom, but Mrs. Beatup filled the passage. “Ivy—you might have toald me. I maade sure as he’d deceived you.” “And I tell you he dudn’t. He toald me he wur wed, and about his childer, and that dress-up hop-pole of a wife of his’n.” “And you went walking out wud a married man, for all the Street to see!” “Why not? There wur no harm done.” “No harm! I tell you it wurn’t simly.” “He’d no friends in these parts, and a man liks a woman he can talk to.” “He’d got his wife, surelye.” “Not hereabouts. He wur middling sick wud lonesomeness.” Mrs. Beatup sniffed. “Well, you can justabout git shut of him now. Your faather and me woan’t have you walking out wud a married man. So maake up your mind to that.” Ivy muttered something surly and thick—the tears were already in her throat, and pushing past her mother, she ran upstairs. Once alone, her feelings overcame her, and she threw herself upon the bed, sobbing with grief and rage. Seagrim had deceived her, had meant to deceive her—that was quite plain. Though he had never definitely spoken of marriage, he had quite definitely posed to her as a single man. She gathered from Mrs. Seagrim that he made a habit of these escapades. Lord! what a fool she had been—and yet, why should she have doubted him whom she loved so utterly? Her hair, matted into her eyes, was soaked with tears, as she rolled her head to and fro on the pillow, thinking of the man she had loved, loved still, and yet hated and despised. He had played her false—she was unable to get over this fact, as a more sophisticated nature might have done. Her confidence, her devotion, her passion, he had paid with treachery and lies. She had not fought her battle with Mrs. Seagrim in his defence—at least not principally—she had fought it to save herself from humiliation in the eyes of this woman, of her mother, and of Sunday Street. Yet she cried to him out of the deep—“Oh, Willie, Willie....” She thought of him in his strength and grizzled beauty—she remembered particularly his neck and his hands. “Oh, Willie, Willie....” She had loved him as she had loved no other man. No other man had filled the day and the night and brought the stars to earth for her and made earth a shining heaven. Her love was crude and physical, but it is one of the paradoxes of love that the greater its materialism the greater its spiritual power, that passion can open a mystic paradise to which romance and affection have not the key. Ivy had seen the heavens open to this clumsy soldier of hers—to this man who had tricked her, bubbled her, brought her to shame.