And since he did not see Louie by the folding door, Louie knew that in his former passings and repassings he could not have seen her either. He disappeared. The Soames girl was waiting by the door, evidently for him. No doubt he was going to see her home. Probably she would have preferred the other, the little cad with the red waistcoat, but she had the lion---- He returned, with his hat on, and they left together. But what had brought that sudden ache into Louie's breast? Mr. Jeffries was nothing to her. If his face shone, Louie's heart need not therefore ache. What ailed her? Unmasked, as alive to things within herself now as she had just been to things outside herself, she sat, deeply wondering. Against the wall at her left hand there stood a tall stationery cupboard. It had glazed doors, and the pale student called Richardson, coming up a moment ago to put his exercise-book back into its place, had left one of the doors open. The door moved on its hinges back into its place. With its motion there swung slowly into Louie's view the reflection of the grimy chandelier with its three naked gas-jets. Was it this that reminded her of the night when she had swept out of Mrs. Lovenant-Smith's French window with the yellow-shaded standard lamp mirrored in its pane? It had been on that night---- Suddenly her eyes closed, as if closed eyes could have shut out a mental picture. Her lips trembled--voicelessly they shaped a name. It was the name of Roy. * * * * * Hitherto she had hardly known what her feelings towards Roy really were. It had been in order to avoid asking herself that question, among others, that she had amused herself with Kitty Windus and welcomed the buffooneries of Mr. Mackie. But it presented itself to her startlingly now. Her own complete ignorance had just revealed a shining thing to her, the beautiful thing that had transformed Mr. Jeffries' face; now--handy-dandy--that very transformation threw her brutally back on her ignorance again. She had thought she had sounded a mystery; had she, after all, _not_ sounded any mystery, and was she to pay in labour and pain for nothing? Her thoughts had flown back; they remained where they had flown. Good gracious! What an escapade! Without mercy for herself she examined it. What had really happened? Anything worth what it was about to cost? The radiant look of another man at another woman answered her: No. She had courted him--what a conquest! She had made him say she was pretty--what a victory! She had schemed, planned, ensured her kisses--what a triumph!... Why, she now asked herself for the first time, had she wanted to triumph? Why had she not seen sooner that what she had really wanted had been to be triumphed over? Triumph?--It came to her with a strange newness that women didn't triumph by triumphing. That man with the back like the church door, for example, who had just gone out with that pretty snippet----