“We will not be beaten,” said Ethel.

“How could we be beaten—­together?” said Lewisham.  “For you I would fight a dozen worlds.”

It seemed a very sweet and noble thing to them under the sympathetic moonlight, almost indeed too easy for their courage, to be merely fighting the world.

* * * * *

“You ‘aven’t bin married ver’ long,” said Madam Gadow with an insinuating smile, when she readmitted Ethel on Monday morning after Lewisham had been swallowed up by the Schools.

“No, I haven’t very long,” admitted Ethel.

“You are ver’ ’appy,” said Madam Gadow, and sighed.

“I was ver’ ’appy,” said Madam Gadow.

CHAPTER XXIII.

MR. CHAFFERY AT HOME.

The golden mists of delight lifted a little on Monday, when Mr. and Mrs. G.E.  Lewisham went to call on his mother-in-law and Mr. Chaffery.  Mrs. Lewisham went in evident apprehension, but clouds of glory still hung about Lewisham’s head, and his manner was heroic.  He wore a cotton shirt and linen collar, and a very nice black satin tie that Mrs. Lewisham had bought on her own responsibility during the day.  She naturally wanted him to look all right.

Mrs. Chaffery appeared in the half light of the passage as the top of a grimy cap over Ethel’s shoulder and two black sleeves about her neck.  She emerged as a small, middle-aged woman, with a thin little nose between silver-rimmed spectacles, a weak mouth and perplexed eyes, a queer little dust-lined woman with the oddest resemblance to Ethel in her face.  She was trembling visibly with nervous agitation.

She hesitated, peering, and then kissed Mr. Lewisham effusively.  “And this is Mr. Lewisham!” she said as she did so.

She was the third thing feminine to kiss Lewisham since the promiscuous days of his babyhood.  “I was so afraid—­There!” She laughed hysterically.

“You’ll excuse my saying that it’s comforting to see you—­honest like and young.  Not but what Ethel ... He has been something dreadful,” said Mrs. Chaffery.  “You didn’t ought to have written about that mesmerising.  And of all letters that which Jane wrote—­there!  But he’s waiting and listening—­”

“Are we to go downstairs, Mums?” asked Ethel.

“He’s waiting for you there,” said Mrs. Chaffery.  She held a dismal little oil lamp, and they descended a tenebrous spiral structure into an underground breakfast-room lit by gas that shone through a partially frosted globe with cut-glass stars.  That descent had a distinctly depressing effect upon Lewisham.  He went first.  He took a deep breath at the door.  What on earth was Chaffery going to say?  Not that he cared, of course.

Chaffery was standing with his back to the fire, trimming his finger-nails with a pocket-knife.  His gilt glasses were tilted forward so as to make an inflamed knob at the top of his long nose, and he regarded Mr. and Mrs. Lewisham over them with—­Lewisham doubted his eyes for a moment—­but it was positively a smile, an essentially waggish smile.