"I'm sorry. I oughtn't to have come," said Louie, walking with the angry girl to the telephone exchange, where the lights on the great switchboard came and went like the sparks at the back of a gate. They were coming and going with great rapidity that morning. "Oh, _much_ obliged for your company, I'm sure," Ivy broke out, "but----" "Sssh!" came from a girl who stretched the rubber worms. "Sssh yourself, Daisy Dawson--time you knew how to speak into a phone by this time!" snapped Ivy. But another and a louder "Sssh!" came from another girl, and suddenly Mr. Stonor's head appeared in the doorway. "Quiet there!" he rapped out, and withdrew his head again. "Sssh, Ivy--haven't you heard?" Daisy Dawson said softly. Ivy's own voice dropped. "What?" she asked quickly. "About Mr. Jeffries." "No--what?" Mr. Stonor came in again--but not before Louie had heard Daisy whisper the word "dead." Suddenly she remembered the face of the liftman. She clutched Mr. Stonor's arm. He looked at her. There was no need to ask. Dead! Slowly she walked to her own table behind the screen. The place was at once busier and more hushed than usual. Presently Mr. Whitlock passed. Mr. Whitlock was thirty-five; he looked fifty. Louie only asked him a single question: "Is it in the papers?" He nodded and passed on. She sought a messenger. It was on the right-hand middle page. It had happened at one o'clock in the morning; cerebral haemorrhage. That very evening he had given a dinner-party; followed a short interview with Sir Peregrine Campbell, one of the guests; but Mr. Robson, of the Board of Trade, had declined to be seen. There would be no inquest. Heartfelt sympathy was extended to his widow. Half-a-column of "career" closed the announcement. The early edition of the evening paper for which she sent out had it all over again. Dead! Another absence! Slowly she turned the paper and began at the beginning again. Jim dead! * * * * * That night Louie fetched Jimmy from his cot into her own bed. It was not, she felt, for comfort for herself; she had a strange feeling that she ought to be comforting Jimmy. Jimmy slept, but, her eyes alternately very widely open and very tightly closed in the dark, she whispered to him.