But nonsense or not, it was stronger than all her efforts to think about something else. Perhaps it was her own false start that set her wondering, and ever returning to her wonder, whether he had not made one too. He seemed to have set up the figure of Evie Soames in his own imagination, and probably had not looked at Evie Soames as she actually was since. He seemed to have his full share of that masculine vanity which will have nothing to do with the compromise by which the world jogs on; his rapt, lion's eyes might see visions afar off, and he would not as much as know that his shins were black and raw with the bruises of the hard facts among which he stumbled. Little as Louie knew of him, she thought she knew that. Lucky Evie Soames, who might be as stupid as the mud beneath her feet, yet in one man's blind, far-seeing eyes could do no wrong! But of course it was nonsense that Louie should have to recognise Evie Soames for her rival. Yet, on one other point, as she lay with the babe at her breast and her eyes fixed on the little flame of the nightlight, she was already prepared to make a wager with herself. Her theory was still only a theory; she could not prove it; but it could prove itself. It would work out or it would not work out; if it worked out--well, Louie was a woman, and no woman hesitates for a single moment to put on the mantle of the prophet. Indeed, she had prophesied long before. "Circumstances are strong," this Mr. Jeffries who had since been a commissionaire had admitted when she had danced with him, "but is anybody ever beaten unless they deserve to be?" And he had taken his failure in the examination as a sign that he ought not to have gone in for it, and had refused to enter again. Yes, the earthenware vessel was on the point of collision with the one of bronze, and which would break the months or the weeks or the days would show. Kitty must not think that it availed a predestined spinster anything that she got engaged; Mr. Jeffries would never marry Kitty. And if Louie herself had returned to the Business School after Christmas---- Her dream of how she had danced with him, and he had said "_You_ understand," and she had replied, "_I_ should have found a way to keep you," returned vividly to her---- She would have found a way. Then she remembered that which even then had stood between. Excitedly she clutched her boy to her--he woke with the pressure, and gave a little croaking cry. This, then, was the first of the two things that remained to be told about this part of Louie's story. For the second of them she had neither years nor months to wait, but a bare fortnight. A very few words will tell it.