Shawe departed, and paid the welcome cheque into his bank. He could now afford to marry Audrey at once, and take her away from all the soiled circumstances of her life. He felt duly grateful to Madame Coralie, but he did not wish Audrey, when she was Mrs. Shawe, to see more of her than was consistent with her being a relation. For the moment he felt inclined to go to Walpole Lane and tell Audrey all about Lady Sanby's offer and her kindness in giving him such a welcome wedding-present; but he knew that Audrey would be disappointed if he had nothing to tell about Miss Pearl, so resolved before he again sought the Pink Shop to see the lady in question. Miss Pearl wrote and said that she would be pleased to see him at the time he mentioned. Therefore, the next morning, Ralph duly walked to the quiet house in the quiet Bloomsbury Square wherein Miss Pearl had her rooms. A demure maidservant admitted him into the house and conducted him up the wide staircase--it was an old Georgian mansion--to the sitting-room of the lady. When she departed to tell Miss Pearl that her visitor had arrived, the young barrister glanced round the room to see if he could gather from its furnishing what the character of the future Lady Branwin was like. It struck him--oddly enough, considering her profession of dancer and singer--that she was something of a Puritan. The room was spacious and had a lofty ceiling painted with wreaths of flowers and love-knots of blue ribbon. Under this roof, which suggested gay Pompadour fancies, the room looked cold and drab. The furniture was of a dark wood upholstered in dark green. The windows--two French windows which opened on to an iron balcony--were draped with green curtains, and the carpet was also green, without any pattern. In the centre of the apartment was a prim table on which books were placed at regular intervals. One of these books Shawe found to be the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and another was the _Chronicles of the Schonberg-Cotta Family_. He felt rather astonished as this was not the class of literature he expected Miss Pearl to favour. Then the room was altogether so stiff and formal, and so deadly cold, in spite of its being warm in the open air, that the barrister was puzzled. "I must have been shown into the apartment of some missionary by mistake," was his reflection, and he sat down greatly bewildered. "A woman who dances at a music-hall can't possibly like to live in such a room; but I always heard that she was aggressively respectable."