* * * * *

The following day Mr. Lucas Holderness received his cheque for a guinea.  Unhappily it was crossed.  He meditated for some time, and then took pen and ink and improved Lewisham’s careless “one” to “five” and touched up his unticked figure one to correspond.

You perceive him, a lank, cadaverous, good-looking man with long black hair and a semi-clerical costume of quite painful rustiness.  He made the emendations with grave carefulness.  He took the cheque round to his grocer.  His grocer looked at it suspiciously.

“You pay it in,” said Mr. Lucas Holderness, “if you’ve any doubts about it.  Pay it in. I don’t know the man or what he is.  He may be a swindler for all I can tell. I can’t answer for him.  Pay it in and see.  Leave the change till then.  I can wait.  I’ll call round in a few days’ time.”

“All right, wasn’t it?” said Mr. Lucas Holderness in a casual tone two days later.

“Quite, sir,” said his grocer with enhanced respect, and handed him his four pounds thirteen and sixpence change.

Mr. Lucas Holderness, who had been eyeing the grocer’s stock with a curious intensity, immediately became animated and bought a tin of salmon.  He went out of the shop with the rest of the money in his hand, for the pockets of his clothes were old and untrustworthy.  At the baker’s he bought a new roll.

He bit a huge piece of the roll directly he was out of the shop, and went on his way gnawing.  It was so large a piece that his gnawing mouth was contorted into the ugliest shapes.  He swallowed by an effort, stretching his neck each time.  His eyes expressed an animal satisfaction.  He turned the corner of Judd Street biting again at the roll, and the reader of this story, like the Lewishams, hears of him no more.

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE GLAMOUR FADES.

After all, the rosy love-making and marrying and Epithalamy are no more than the dawn of things, and to follow comes all the spacious interval of white laborious light.  Try as we may to stay those delightful moments, they fade and pass remorselessly; there is no returning, no recovering, only—­for the foolish—­the vilest peep-shows and imitations in dens and darkened rooms.  We go on—­we grow.  At least we age.  Our young couple, emerging presently from an atmosphere of dusk and morning stars, found the sky gathering greyly overhead and saw one another for the first time clearly in the light of every-day.

It might perhaps witness better to Lewisham’s refinement if one could tell only of a moderated and dignified cooling, of pathetic little concealments of disappointment and a decent maintenance of the sentimental atmosphere.  And so at last daylight.  But our young couple were too crude for that.  The first intimations of their lack of identity have already been described, but it would be tedious and