The girl’s dark eyes, unmoved from his face, roused in him a spasm of nervous irritation.  “Your soul is in great danger, and you’re very unhappy, I can see.  Turn to God for help, and in His mercy everything will be made so different for you—­so very different!  Come!”

The girl said with a sort of surprising quietness:  “I don’t want the baby!”

The remark staggered him, almost as if she had uttered a hideous oath.

“’Ilda was in munitions,” said her mother in an explanatory voice:  “earnin’ a matter of four pound a week.  Oh! dear, it is a waste an’ all!” A queer, rather terrible little smile curled Pierson’s lips.

“A judgment!” he said.  “Good evening, Mrs. Mitchett.  Good evening, Hilda.  If you want me when the time comes, send for me.”

They stood up; he shook hands with them; and was suddenly aware that the door was open, and Noel standing there.  He had heard no sound; and how long she had been there he could not tell.  There was a singular fixity in her face and attitude.  She was staring at the girl, who, as she passed, lifted her face, so that the dark eyes and the grey eyes met.  The door was shut, and Noel stood there alone with him.

“Aren’t you early, my child?” said Pierson.  “You came in very quietly.”

“Yes; I heard.”

A slight shock went through him at the tone of her voice; her face had that possessed look which he always dreaded.  “What did you hear?” he said.

“I heard you say:  ‘A judgment!’ You’ll say the same to me, won’t you?  Only, I do want my baby.”

She was standing with her back to the door, over which a dark curtain hung; her face looked young and small against its stuff, her eyes very large.  With one hand she plucked at her blouse, just over her heart.

Pierson stared at her, and gripped the back of the chair he had been sitting in.  A lifetime of repression served him in the half-realised horror of that moment.  He stammered out the single word—­

“Nollie!”

“It’s quite true,” she said, turned round, and went out.

Pierson had a sort of vertigo; if he had moved, he must have fallen down.  Nollie!  He slid round and sank into his chair, and by some horrible cruel fiction of his nerves, he seemed to feel Noel on his knee, as, when a little girl, she had been wont to sit, with her fair hair fluffing against his cheek.  He seemed to feel that hair tickling his skin; it used to be the greatest comfort he had known since her mother died.  At that moment his pride shrivelled like a flower held to a flame; all that abundant secret pride of a father who loves and admires, who worships still a dead wife in the children she has left him; who, humble by nature, yet never knows how proud he is till the bitter thing happens; all the long pride of the priest who, by dint of exhortation and remonstrance has coated himself in a superiority he hardly suspects—­all this pride shrivelled