"Oh, my dear, we don't know. Isn't it dreadful? None of us knows. She was engaged to be married to Arthur Madden--you remember him, perhaps at the Frivolity last year--and suddenly he married another girl and Sylvia vanished--utterly and completely. She went abroad, that's all we know." So Sylvia with all her self-assurance had not been able to escape a fall. In Dorothy's present mood it would have been unfair to say that she was glad to find that Sylvia was vulnerable, but she did feel that if she ever met Sylvia again she should perhaps get back her old affection for her more easily. And while she was thinking this about Sylvia she suddenly realized that all these other people must be feeling the same about herself. The revival of her intimacy with Olive made a great difference to Dorothy's stay in West Kensington, and she might even have stayed on at Lonsdale Road until her baby was born had not her two married sisters turned out to be going to have babies also. Though Dorothy had never possessed a very keen sense of humor, her sense of the ridiculous had been sufficiently developed to make her feel that the sight of three young women in an interesting condition round the dining-room table of No. 17 would be a little too much of a good thing. She therefore wrote to Doctor Lane to say that she wanted her child to be born in Devonshire, and asked for his advice. He suggested that she should go to a nursing-home he knew of in Ilfracombe. Thither she went in the month of January, taking with her from Lonsdale Road that old colored supplement inscribed "Yoicks! Tally-Ho"; and there, without any of those raptures that marked her first pregnancy, but with abundant health and serenity of purpose, she waited for her time to come, and at the end of April bore a posthumous son to Clarehaven. III