The choice of a dwelling was a most difficult matter. As it must be quite a small house, the remoter suburbs could alone supply what was wanted; Morphew spent every Saturday and Sunday in wearisome exploration. Mrs. Winter, though in theory she accepted the necessity of cheapness, shrank from every practical suggestion declaring it impossible to live in such places as Cecil requested her to look at. She had an ideal of the 'nice little house,' and was as likely to discover it in London's suburbs as to become possessed once more of the considerable fortune which she and her husband had squandered in mean extravagance. Morphew had already come to the conclusion, and Henrietta agreed with him, that their future home must be chosen without regard to Mrs. Winter's impracticable ideas. And the sooner the better, in her own interests; for it was plain that so long as she continued in the old house she would thoughtlessly waste her means. The end of the twelvemonth, at latest, must see them all in their new home. But meanwhile fate was preparing a new trial for Henrietta's much-disciplined conscience. On a Saturday afternoon, when the crisis of Alma's illness was over, Harvey received a telegram summoning him to Westminster Bridge Road. "Come if you possibly can. Or I must come to you." Only yesterday he had been with Morphew for a couple of hours, and all seemed well; Cecil thought he had found the house that would suit him; he was in jubilant spirits, laughing, singing, more boylike than ever. Suspecting new obstructiveness on the part of Mrs. Winter, Harvey went to town in an impatient mood. He found the shop closed, as usual at this hour on Saturday, and rang the house-door bell. Morphew himself replied, with a countenance which made known forthwith that something extraordinary had happened; eyes red and swollen, cheeks puffy, colourless, smeared. "Well?" Cecil clutched at his hand, and drew him in. They went upstairs to the office, where all was quiet. "Rolfe, if I hadn't had you to send for, I should have been dead by now. There's poison enough in this place. It has tempted me fearfully." "What, is it?" asked the other, in a not very sympathetic voice. His own troubles of the past month made mere love-miseries seem artificial. "I shall have to tell you what I wanted to tell you long ago. If I had, most likely this would never have happened.--It's all over with me, Rolfe. I wish to God you had let me die in that hotel at Brussels.--She has been told something about me, and there's an end of everything. She sent for me this morning. I never thought she could be so pitiless.--The kind of thing that a man thinks nothing of. And herself the cause of it, if only I had dared to tell her so!" 'The old story, I suppose,' said Harvey. 'Some other woman?'