"Funny he went away like that, wasn’t it?" the deaf old woman remarked, though inwardly she suspected that there had been some quarrel between them, and that he had left her in consequence. "Yes," replied the girl faintly. Then she asked after Mr. Boyne. "Oh! he’s been away four days now. He said he was going into Wales on some insurance business, and would be away a week or perhaps ten days." "Unusual for him to go away, isn’t it?" Marigold remarked. "Yes. He’s never been away for more than a week together in all the time I’ve been with him." The girl left Hammersmith early, and, returning to Wimbledon Park, sat at her window and wept for a long time before retiring to rest. To her the world was empty and hopeless without Gerald. What had she done, she wondered, that he should have left her in that fashion. That he was following Boyne was a mere excuse, she felt sure. It irritated her to think that he should try to deceive her. What was he doing in Birmingham? If there were reasons why he did not wish to return to London, then why did he not give her his address, and then she could easily have run up to see him. The more she thought it over the more mystified did she become. The mystery was increased three days later when, on returning from the City, she found a telegram on the table in the narrow hall. Her heart leapt as she tore it open. It had been sent from Paris, of all places, and read: "_Sorry could not write, dear. Do not worry. Shall be back soon. Have wired to the office. Love._—GERALD." "Love!—Gerald!" she repeated aloud to herself. "Oh! why does he not give me an address, so that I can write to him? It’s cruel—very cruel of him to keep me in suspense like this!" she cried in a frenzy of despair. She ate sparingly in the little dining-room of the jerry-built villa—for nowhere is the jerry-builder more in evidence than in Wimbledon Park, with his white-painted gables and his white-painted balconies to his six-roomed houses. But let us not misunderstand. It is best for the workers—the brains and backbone of England—to live in smiling houses, even though jerry-built, than in many of those grey, rain-sodden houses of the Midlands and the North, where the "knocker-up" pursues his calling each dawn and the factory hooter sounds all too early. Personally, the writer here declares that he has no love for the capitalist. The latter has too often, ever since the Early Victorian days, been either a swindler or an aristocrat of bad intentions, and the jerry-builder was the natural outcome of his parting with his estate. Poor Marigold! She could go no farther in the maze of doubt and uncertainty. A dozen times that night she re-read the mysterious, but unconvincing, message. She was a girl of high intelligence, or she would not have been employed by the bank. The whole affair puzzled her, as it would indeed have puzzled anybody.