to look ahead for Louis.  She felt that every eye was fixed on her with base curiosity....  When, after the endless ordeal of the aisle, she reached her place, Louis was not there.  And though she was glad, she took offence at his delay.  Gathering up the reticule with a nervous sweep of the hand, she departed from the theatre, her eyes full of tears.  And amid all the wild confusion in her brain one little thought flashed clear and was gone:  the wastefulness of paying for a whole night’s entertainment and then only getting ten minutes of it!

IV

She met Louis Fores high up Bycars Lane, about a hundred yards below Mrs. Maldon’s house.  She saw some one come out of the gate of the house, and heard the gate clang in the distance.  For a moment she could not surely identify the figure, but as soon as Louis, approaching, and carrying his stick, grew unmistakable even in the darkness, all her agitation, which had been subsiding under the influence of physical exercise, rose again to its original fever.

“Ah!” said Louis, greeting her with a most deferential salute.  “There you are.  I was really beginning to wonder.  I opened the front door, but there was no light and no sound, so I shut it again and came back.  What happened to you?”

His ingenuous and delightful face, so confident, good-natured, and respectful, had exactly the same effect on her as before.  At the sight of it Thomas Batchgrew’s vague accusation against Louis was dismissed utterly as the rancorous malice of an evil old man.  For the rest, she had never given it any real credit, having an immense trust in her own judgment.  But she had no intention of letting Louis go free.  As she had been put in the wrong, so must he be put in the wrong.  This seemed to her only just.  Besides, was he not wholly to blame?  Also she remembered with strange clearness the admiration in the mien of the hated Batchgrew, and the memory gave her confidence.

She said, with an effort after chilly detachment—­

“I couldn’t wait in the cinema alone for ever.”

He was perturbed.

“But I assure you,” he said nicely, “I was as quick as ever I could be.  Heath had put my stick in his back parlour to keep it safe for me, and it was quite a business finding it again.  Why didn’t you wait?...  I say, I hope you weren’t vexed at my leaving you.”

“Of course I wasn’t vexed,” she answered, with heat.  “Didn’t I tell you I didn’t mind?  But if you want to know, old Batchgrew came along while you were gone and insulted me.”

“Insulted you?  How?  What was he doing there?”

“How should I know what he was doing there?  Better ask him questions like that!  All I can tell you is that he came to me and called me into a room at the back—­and—­and—­told me I’d no business to be there, nor you either, while Mrs. Maldon was ill in bed.”

“Silly old fool!  I hope you didn’t take any notice of him.”