“Never mind,” said Hal quickly. “It didn’t matter.” Then to Basil, in explanation: “G said something about Doris’s fiancé, not knowing I was his sister, but I quite forget what it was. Good-bye, G,” holding out a frank hand. “I think you’re a delightful person, and I’m just as glad as Basil that you weren’t left out of the alphabet.” A few minutes later Doris came in, looking flushed and stealthy, and the first thing Hal noticed was a loverly little diamond brooch she had not seen before. “What a darling brooch,” she exclaimed, after their greeting. “Did Dudley give you that? He might have shown it to me.” “No...” stammered Doris, turning red. “I’ve had it a long time. It’s not real.” “Well, it’s a wonderful imitation, then” said Hall a little drily—and remembered the man like a pawnbroker’s shop. Then Ethel joined them, and Hal’s quick eyes saw the still increasing anxiety, just as surely as she saw the increased furtiveness in Doris’s side-long glances. And because of all that she felt for Ethel, she trust her own care into the background resolutely, and made the evening as gay as she could while she was there. Only afterwards she went home through the lamp-lit darkness, feeling as if some vague shadow had descended silently upon her little world. What was this insistent, nameless fear at her own heart? Why was Lorraine weeping when she found her yesterday? Why was trouble steadily gathering on Ethel’s face? What was this gossip about Doris?— The gloom of a foggy night added to her depression. Why, in the tube railway, did all these people about her look so white and tired and lifeless? Did they just go on in their niches, in the same way that the grotesque music-teacher had gone on in hers for all those monotonous years; only to become like an uncared-for, unwanted letter of the alphabet pushed in to fill up a blank in a big city at last? Were they all gargoyles-fixed, rigid, joyless, carved things, fastened in their respective niches, not for ornament, or for use specially, but just because the general machine seemed to require them? And if so—why?... why?... why?— It was so easy to be joyous if one was made for it. Such a little would make every one gay, if they were fashioned accordingly. What could be the good of disfiguring a beautiful world with all these vacant, expressionless, hopeless masks? Hal did not read poetry. She was perfectly frank about being utterly bored with it. When she had anything to say, she liked to say it straight out, she explained, without twisting it about to make it rhyme with something just shoved in to fill up the line; and she preferred other people to do the same. Yet, perhaps, at that particular moment, had she seen the lines: “Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire, Would not we shatter it to bits—and then Remould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire?”