The boy was at the river wall again on Fri­day the four­teenth of Janu­ary, at half past three, with his cop­ies de­livered and the empty wrap­per under one arm, and his little book open on the cop­ing, draw­ing.

Mr. Kinross had watched him do it for a fort­night from the second bench with­out think­ing about him. He thought about him now, be­cause the frost had come down harder in the night and the boy’s hands were blue, and be­cause he had been stand­ing at that wall for twenty minutes with his tongue be­tween his teeth, as though the river would not keep. Mr. Kinross got up. He could not have said why. He had not spoken to any­body in that garden since the first of Janu­ary ex­cept Fig­gis, who did not count, being weather; and he went down the walk with the un­com­fort­able sense of a man break­ing a rule he had made for him­self, and not know­ing which rule it was.

The boy heard him on the gravel, and turned, and went white, and then red, and then stood very straight with his back to the wall and his book held against his coat.

“I beg your par­don, sir.”

“For what?”

The boy did not seem to know. He looked at the wrap­per under his arm, and at the book, and at Mr. Kinross’s boots, which were the only part of Mr. Kinross that he ap­peared able to look at.

“I’m not to stop, sir. Only the gen­tle­man in Paper Build­ings sends an an­swer back by me, and it’s never ready till four, and his clerk sends me down to wait for it.”

“Then you are not stop­ping,” said Mr. Kinross. “You are wait­ing. It is a dif­fer­ent thing; the whole of the law turns on it.” He looked at the book. “May I see?”

There was a pause, in which he could see the boy weigh­ing it, as though a great deal hung on the an­swer, and per­haps it did. Then the book was held out to him, at arm’s length, as Mr. Ogle had held out the sale.

It was a dozen spoilt sheets sewn to­gether, with some­body’s deed show­ing through each of them from the back; and Mr. Kinross turned them over stand­ing at the river wall, with the frost on his hat, and for­got that it was cold. There was the round church; there were the old trees, bare; there was the gardener, scowl­ing at his own walk, and Fig­gis in the door of the lodge, telling some­body the weather. There were two Bench­ers he knew, two of the old gen­tle­men who gov­ern the Inn, going in to din­ner, so ex­actly them­selves that he laughed aloud, and the boy jumped. And there, on four leaves near the end, drawn so lately that the black-lead had not yet rubbed, was a gen­tle­man on the second bench under the plane.

It was him­self. He had not known that any­body in Lon­don had looked at him long enough to draw him. He was not flattered, for the boy had not flattered him; he was a long, dark, un­com­fort­able per­son, sit­ting very still in a coat that was too good for the weather, and read­ing as though the book owed him money. But he had been looked at, as he had looked at rail­ings and boots and kit­chens all that winter, by some­body who wanted to know what was there; and he stood at the wall and did not know what to say.

Near the end, as he turned a leaf, the boy’s hand came out quickly and turned two to­gether, so that he should not see the one be­tween. Then the boy went scar­let, be­cause he knew that he had been seen to do it.

Mr. Kinross did not ask. He had kept a good many things him­self that winter, and he knew what it looked like from the out­side.

“Who taught you?”

“Nobody, sir.”

“Nobody draws like this whom nobody has taught.”

“The pic­tures did, sir. At the Hos­pital.” The boy said it to the boots. “I’m from the Found­ling. We went past them every day.”

“Mr. Hog­arth’s,” said Mr. Kinross, who had been taken to see them at twelve years old by his uncle, and had looked at the chil­dren more than at the pic­tures. “You chose your mas­ters well. What is your name?”

“Tucker, sir. Tobias.”

“Then I am ob­liged to you, Mr. Tucker,” said Mr. Kinross, and gave him back the book. “You have made me look a great deal more pa­tient than I am.”

The boy took the book and held it. He did not say any­thing at all. He had gone quite still, in the way of a small an­imal that has been touched where it did not ex­pect to be; and Mr. Kinross, who had meant to ask him whom he was bound to, saw the face shut at the very be­gin­ning of the ques­tion, and did not ask it. He knew that face. It was the face of some­body who has been told all his life that he may be sent back, and be­lieves that a gen­tle­man who asks the name of your mas­ter is a gen­tle­man who means to write to him.

“Do you go to any school of draw­ing?”

“No, sir.”

“Would you?”

The boy looked up, for the first time, into his face; and Mr. Kinross was sorry he had asked, be­cause he saw that it was a ques­tion nobody had ever put to him, and that the an­swer was too large to come out.

St. Dun­stan’s struck four in Fleet Street. The boy star­ted, and said that the gen­tle­man in Paper Build­ings would have the an­swer ready, and went away up the walk at a run, with the wrap­per under his arm and the book in­side his coat; and at the corner of the walk he stopped, and turned round, and stood a mo­ment, and then ran on.

Mr. Kinross went back to his cham­bers and wrote a let­ter to his at­tor­ney.

*  *  *  *  *

Mr. Merridew of Lin­coln’s Inn had done Mr. Kinross’s busi­ness for nine years, and had never yet been asked to do any­thing he could not enter in a book under a head­ing. He read the let­ter twice, on the Sat­urday morn­ing, with his cli­ent sit­ting op­pos­ite, and then looked up over it with the ex­pres­sion of a man who has been asked to con­vey an es­tate in the moon.

“A boy.”

“A boy who draws. He car­ries cop­ies into the Temple for a law-sta­tioner every af­ter­noon, at about half past three, and waits at the river wall for an an­swer to carry back. You will find him with­out dif­fi­culty; he is the only per­son in the Inner Temple who is happy.” Mr. Kinross had his hat on his knee. “He is to go to a school of draw­ing. Mr. Sass’s, in Bloomsbury, is the best; they send boys on from it to the Acad­emy Schools. You will pay the fees, by the quarter, in ad­vance. You will pay his mas­ter for the af­ter­noons the boy loses from the shop, at whatever the mas­ter says they are worth, and a little more, so that the mas­ter is glad of it. And you will see that the boy has paper.”

“In whose name?”

“In nobody’s.”

Mr. Merridew laid the let­ter down.

“Sir, I have been asked to do a good many things in nobody’s name. Most of them were not things a man would wish to put his name to. This is the first time I have been asked to do a kind­ness that way.”

“Then you will find it new. If any­body asks, the money comes from a gen­tle­man who wishes to be nobody in par­tic­u­lar.”

“And the mas­ter’s name? His dir­ec­tion? I shall need both.”

“You will need both,” said Mr. Kinross. “I do not.” He stood up. “I do not wish to be told the mas­ter’s name, or where the boy lives, or how he does, or whether he is grate­ful. Most par­tic­u­larly not that.”

Mr. Merridew looked at him for some time.

“Most gen­tle­men,” he said, “like to know what they are pay­ing for.”

“I know ex­actly what I am pay­ing for,” said Mr. Kinross, and went out.

He did know. He had looked at a dozen spoilt sheets of paper at a river wall and found in them a thing made care­fully, for nobody, by some­body who did not know whether it was good, be­cause nobody had ever told him. He had been doing the same thing him­self for a year, in Albe­marle Street, with­out a name; and the only dif­fer­ence be­tween them, that he could see, was Ardoch, the land in Scot­land that paid for everything he did, and an uncle who had taken him to look at the Hog­ar­ths. It had noth­ing to do with her. He would have said so; and he did not know where the boy lived.

*  *  *  *  *

The boy had said it on the stair on Tues­day the eight­eenth, out­side the door on the jar, while Kit read on into the second volume of Ivan­hoe: that he meant to be hung at Somer­set House.

He did not say it as a wish. He said it as Kit might have said that he meant to be called to the bar: as a thing that would hap­pen, given the time, and the money, and the draw­ing from the an­tique, which he had heard you had to do first, from the casts. He had found out where the Acad­emy hung its pic­tures in May, and how many there were, and that a boy of four­teen had been hung there last year; and he told Clem­ency these things on the dark stair, in a whis­per, so as not to in­ter­rupt Kit, with the ex­act­ness of a clerk read­ing back a deed.

She went back to her chair by the door, and did not hear the next chapter at all.

Under her bed there was a port­fo­lio of draw­ings that nobody had seen, and that she had told her­self for a year that nobody would ever see; and below her on the stair was a boy who had never been told that he could not be seen, and so meant to be. She did not know which

of them was the fool. She sus­pec­ted, as she sat in the draught with her hands in her lap, that it was not the boy.

On Monday the twenty-fourth she went to Bloomsbury with three of his draw­ings in her retic­ule.

She had asked him for them on the Sat­urday, and he had chosen them him­self, slowly, at the turn of the stair, from the loose sheets he kept under his board, hold­ing each up to the win­dow and put­ting most of them back: the round church, the gardener with his broom, and two Bench­ers going in to din­ner. He never asked what she wanted them for. He gave them to her as though he were giv­ing her the book it­self; and she no­ticed, with­out seem­ing to, that he did not offer her the book.

Mr. Sass’s was a tall plain house in Bloomsbury with a brass plate, and in the hall a smell of size and chalk, and through an open door a long room full of plaster gods and young men draw­ing them. The gods were very white and had no clothes on. The young men had a good many clothes on, and were all, as far as she could see, about nine­teen, and all draw­ing the same foot.

The mas­ter was en­gaged, and was not to be seen. The young man who kept the door that morn­ing took the three draw­ings in to him, hold­ing them by the corners as though they might go off; and came out again in ten minutes, a good deal more re­spect­ful than he had gone in.

“He says, ma’am, who drew them?”

“A boy of four­teen,” said Clem­ency, “who has never been taught.”

“He says he can tell that, ma’am. He says the boy has never drawn a cast in his life and has an eye like a hawk, and he will see him, and if the boy can draw a foot by Lady Day he will take him.” The young man con­sul­ted a paper. “The terms are four guineas the quarter, paid in ad­vance, and the boy finds his own chalk.”

Four guineas the quarter.

She thanked him, and took the draw­ings back, and went out and stood on the pave­ment and did the sum.

The Lady Day rent was in the drawer already, twelve pounds out of Decem­ber’s money, and was not to be touched. Everything else until the tenth of Feb­ru­ary was the Lon­don’s twelve guineas: the coals and the candles, Kit’s boots, Lucy’s spring gown, and whatever broke. Four guineas was a third of it, to the shil­ling. It was everything that the Lydiards had learned since Bread Street to do with­out, put to­gether and given to a law-sta­tioner’s boy who was noth­ing to them, so that he could go and draw feet.

She stood on the pave­ment for a long time, with the plaster gods be­hind

her in the win­dow, and made up her mind.

She had never in her life spent money that was already prom­ised to some­thing else. It was the whole of her art and the whole of her char­ac­ter, and she had been proud of both. Walk­ing home down Hol­born with the draw­ings in her retic­ule, she knew that she was going to do it, out of the Lon­don’s money, and tell nobody, and man­age the rest as she had man­aged everything else; and she was not in the least afraid. She had given things un­seen be­fore, a rib­bon for Lucy and a bon­net, and let Kit have the thanks; but those had been for the fam­ily, out of what the fam­ily could spare. This was for a boy who was noth­ing to them, out of what they could not.

*  *  *  *  *

Mr. Kinross took the south side of Fleet Street from the second week, as he had said he would.

He began at the Temple and went east: into Mitre Court and out of it, and down Bouv­erie Street, which was new and had noth­ing to hide, and into the old lanes of White­friars be­hind it, where a hun­dred years be­fore the debt­ors of Lon­don had lived in sanc­tu­ary and the bailiffs could not come. They had re­membered it. Within two days the whole of White­friars had de­cided that he was a bailiff after all, come to see whether the old priv­ilege still held; and a man in Ram Alley stood in his door­way with his arms fol­ded and watched him the whole length of it, with­out a word, as a farmer watches a fox go along a hedge.

It was slow work. White­friars was a war­ren of courts that opened into other courts, and pas­sages that went under houses and came out in yards, so that a man who meant to see every door in it must go over the same ground three times; and he meant to see every door. It took him the rest of Janu­ary. He did not see her. He looked at faces under bon­nets and at boots and at the win­dows over shops, and asked nobody any­thing, and went down to the second bench at three; and every af­ter­noon the boy came through with his cop­ies, and came down again from Paper Build­ings at half past three, and touched his hat to the second bench, scar­let, and stopped at the wall to wait for his an­swer, and drew; and every af­ter­noon at four went away up the walk at a run, and turned at the corner, and ran on.

In the last week of Janu­ary the news came up from Sid­mouth that the Duke of Kent was dead, of a chill caught walk­ing in the wet, at two-and-fifty, with a daugh­ter eight months old; and Fleet Street put black in its win­dows.

By the last Sat­urday in Janu­ary Mr. Kinross had come as far as Water Lane.

*  *  *  *  *

Toby told her on the last Thursday in Janu­ary, at night, on the stair.

He did not whis­per it. He came up the stair two at a time, which he had never done, and stood on the step below her with his face shin­ing, and said it all at once and back­wards, so that it took her some time to put it in order.

A let­ter had come for Mr. Dunning that morn­ing, from an at­tor­ney in Lin­coln’s Inn. Mr. Dunning had read it in the shop, and then read it again, and then called Toby in from the yard with the let­ter in his hand; and for one dread­ful minute, though he did not tell Miss Lydiard this part, Toby had thought that it was the gen­tle­man from the garden, writ­ing to send him back. Then Mr. Dunning called Mrs. Dunning down from the kit­chen, and she read it, and sat down on the stool be­hind the counter and cried, which frightened Toby more, until he understood that it was the good kind. There was a gen­tle­man who would pay for Toby to go to Mr. Sass’s in Bloomsbury, to learn to draw from the casts, four af­ter­noons in the week; and would pay Mr. Dunning for the af­ter­noons, more than they were worth; and would pay for paper. The at­tor­ney had been very par­tic­u­lar that it was not to be asked who the gen­tle­man was. Mr. Dunning had asked any­way, being Mr. Dunning, and the at­tor­ney had writ­ten back by the af­ter­noon post that the gen­tle­man wished to be nobody in par­tic­u­lar.

“Nobody in par­tic­u­lar,” said Toby, as though it were a title. “That’s what it says, miss. Mr. Dunning showed me.”

Clem­ency stood on the stair with the candle, and could not speak.

She was glad. She was so glad that it hurt, some­where under her ribs, like run­ning. And under the glad­ness, small and shame­ful and per­fectly dis­tinct, was some­thing else: the sense of a hand that had gone into her purse ahead of her and taken out the only thing in it she had wanted to give away. She had been fore­stalled all her life by people with money. She had not ex­pec­ted to mind it in this, and she minded it so much that she was ashamed, and was ashamed again of mind­ing.

“Who would do such a thing?” she said at last.

“Nobody knows, miss.” Toby con­sidered it. “Mr. Dunning says it’s some old gen­tle­man of the Inn that’s seen me draw­ing in the garden. He says the Bench­ers are all mad, and that’s the best kind.”

It was the ob­vi­ous an­swer, and she did not take it at once. She thought, for the length of a breath, of an­other gen­tle­man in the Inner Temple: one rich enough to own a maga­zine, who put

his name to noth­ing, and had writ­ten in the Warden that a thing might be done for noth­ing at all; and who sat every af­ter­noon on the second bench, a few yards from where this boy drew. Then she re­membered what Toby had said to her on Twelfth Night: He’s never looked at me. A man does not pay for a boy he has never looked at. She put the thought away, and took the old gen­tle­man of the Inn in­stead; and she liked the old gen­tle­man very much.

Toby had some­thing else to say. She saw it come up into his face and stop there.

He had meant to tell her about the gen­tle­man on the second bench. He had meant to tell her all the way up the stair: that the gen­tle­man had come down to the wall, and looked at his book, and laughed at the Bench­ers, and called him Mr. Tucker. Nobody had ever called him Mr. Tucker. He had said it to him­self all the way to Paper Build­ings, and all the way home, and under his blanket in the little room at the back that Mrs. Dunning had meant for one of hers; and he had meant to give it to Miss Lydiard on the stair, be­cause she was the only per­son in the world he gave things to. And now that he stood on the step below her, with the candle be­tween them, he found that he could not. It was the only thing he had ever had that was en­tirely his own. He kept it. And he thought he knew who nobody in par­tic­u­lar was, be­cause only one per­son in the world had ever asked him Would you?; and he kept that too. He did not know that it was the first lie he had ever told her, be­cause he had not said any­thing; and neither of them knew that it was the one thing she needed to be told.

“I’m to go on Tues­day,” he said in­stead. “If I can draw a foot by Lady Day, he’ll keep me. That’s the twenty-fifth of March, Mrs. Dunning says.”

They were the terms she had been given her­self, on the Monday, in the hall in Bloomsbury, word for word. The mas­ter had re­membered the three draw­ings. She had won the boy his place; and some­body she would never know had paid for it.

“You will draw a foot by Lady Day,” said Clem­ency, “if I have to take off my boot.”

*  *  *  *  *

She had four guineas that nobody now wanted, and she did not want them back.

She took some of them to Acker­mann’s in the Strand on the Fri­day. She had stood at that win­dow in Oc­to­ber, want­ing a cake of car­mine, and had gone away with a rib­bon for Lucy in­stead; and the car­mine had come to her af­ter­wards all the same, in an Acker­mann’s paper on her desk, from her mother, who never went to the Strand and had never said a word

about it. This time she went in, and stood at the counter for a quarter of an hour, and bought, after a great deal of thought and in the teeth of the young man’s ad­vice, a ja­panned box with eight cakes of col­our in it, and two brushes, and a sau­cer.

She chose the col­ours her­self. White, be­cause he drew on brown paper and spoilt sheets, where there was no white to leave. Yel­low ochre, and umber, and light red, for faces and the walls of the Temple; ver­mil­ion, for the sails of barges; Prus­sian blue, for the river and the sky; a green, for the trees in sum­mer, which he had seen only turn­ing; and black. The young man said that there should be a crim­son, and offered her car­mine. She said that there should not, and paid, and went home with the box under her cloak, and found that it had cost her very nearly what her own black would have cost, if she had fol­lowed the town into black for the Duke of Kent, which Salis­bury Square had not. Bom­bazine had gone up four­pence a yard since the news from Sid­mouth; she had no­ticed it, and been glad that she need not buy any.

Her mother saw the Acker­mann’s paper under her cloak when she came in, and looked at it, and at her, and said noth­ing, as she had said noth­ing in Oc­to­ber; and Clem­ency understood that in all her life she had never once given any­thing un­seen with­out being seen by one per­son.

The King died that Sat­urday night, the twenty-ninth of Janu­ary.

*  *  *  *  *

Nobody in Lon­don heard it until the Sunday. The old King had been mad and blind for nine years, shut up at Wind­sor in a purple gown with a long white beard, play­ing the harp­si­chord and talk­ing to people who had died; and it was a long time since any­body but his doc­tors had thought of him as a man who could die at all. Then on the Sunday morn­ing the great bell of St. Paul’s began to toll, slowly, over the whole of the City; and Salis­bury Square, a quarter of a mile below it, heard every stroke.

There was no ques­tion of any­body’s not going into black. Mrs. Lydiard had a black gown laid by in the press, and took it out. Kit was to have a crape band for his hat, which Mr. Pel­ham re­quired of his clerk and which Mr. Pel­ham would not pay for. Lucy, who had a new bon­net from Lud­gate Hill and had been look­ing for­ward to the spring in it, put black rib­bons on it and cried, and said that it was not for the King. And Clem­ency, who had spent her black at Acker­mann’s two days be­fore, took her grey gown down to the wash-house in the yard and dyed it her­self with log­wood and cop­peras. It had to be done on the Sunday, which

her mother said was wrong and al­lowed, be­cause the King was dead and Monday was Mrs. Dunning’s wash­ing-day, when the cop­per would not be free; so she stirred it with a stick for the whole of a Sunday af­ter­noon, while the bell went on over­head.

It came out the col­our of a wet slate. It was not black. It was the best that could be done, and she wore it.

She gave Toby the box that night, on the stair, with the bell still going over the roofs.

He did not take it at first. He looked at it in her hands, and then at her, and then at the box again, as though it might be meant for some­body on the stair be­hind him; and when she put it into his hands he held it against his coat, shut, the way he held his book. Then he sat down on the step and opened it, and coun­ted the cakes with one fin­ger, touch­ing each, and said noth­ing for so long that she began to be afraid she had chosen wrong.

“There isn’t a red,” he said at last. “Not a proper red. For mouths.”

“You can make a mouth with­out it,” said Clem­ency. “Light red and white, and not too much of either. Faces are mostly not the col­our people think they are.”

It was not quite true, and she knew it. Car­mine was the col­our faces were made of. There was a cake of it in her desk up­stairs, in her mother’s paper, and she had not put it in the box; and she did not ask her­self whose face she was keep­ing it for.

He con­sidered this, and looked up at her face in the candle­light, as though to see whether it were true; and then nod­ded, and shut the box, very gently, as if it were asleep.

“Is it from him too, miss? From nobody in par­tic­u­lar?”

“No,” said Clem­ency. “This one is from some­body in par­tic­u­lar.”

He was so happy that for a mo­ment he very nearly told her about the gen­tle­man on the second bench, and Mr. Tucker, and all of it, be­cause she had given him some­thing and he had noth­ing else in the world to give her back. He opened his mouth to do it. Then he re­membered that the gen­tle­man wished to be nobody in par­tic­u­lar, and that it was not his to give; and he shut it again, and said thank you, miss, twice, and went down the stair in the dark with the box held in both hands, care­fully, as Mrs. Dunning car­ried eggs.

*  *  *  *  *

They pro­claimed the new King on the Monday, be­cause the Sunday was the thir­ti­eth of Janu­ary, when an­other king had once lost his head, and nobody liked to begin a reign on it.

All Fleet Street came out to see the her­alds come to Temple Bar. They came from Char­ing Cross in the middle

of the day, in their tabards, with the trum­peters be­fore them and the Horse Guards be­hind; and the City shut its gates in their faces, as it al­ways did, so that a her­ald might knock and be asked who was there, and be let in by the Lord Mayor, and pro­claim King George the Fourth on the City side of the Bar as he had already pro­claimed him on the other. Every win­dow was let. Every post had a boy on it. Lon­don, which had been gov­erned by the new King for nine years under an­other name, and had not liked it, cheered him with the greatest good­will in the world.

Toby had a post. It was the best post in Fleet Street, at the corner of Chan­cery Lane, and he had held it since ten against two print­ers’ dev­ils and a sweep; and from the top of it, over all the hats, he could see the whole street.

He saw the her­alds, and the gates swing open. He saw the Lord Mayor’s coach, and the trum­pets go up. And then, be­cause he was who he was, he stopped look­ing at any of it, and looked at faces.

The gen­tle­man from the second bench was stand­ing in the gate­way of the Inner Temple, in black, a little apart from every­body, with his hat in his hand, not cheer­ing. Twenty yards east of him, on the step of a hat­ter’s, a little above the crowd, stood Miss Lydiard, be­tween her brother and her sis­ter, in a gown the col­our of a wet slate; and she was not cheer­ing either. Neither of them was look­ing at the her­alds. The gen­tle­man was look­ing at the faces in the crowd, slowly, one by one, as Toby did, with his back to the hat­ter’s. Miss Lydiard was look­ing at the gen­tle­man.

Toby sat on his post and held on, and looked from one to the other. They were the only two faces in Fleet Street that he had ever drawn more than once; and there they were, in one look, with the pro­clam­a­tion going over them. She could see the gen­tle­man. The gen­tle­man, who was look­ing for some­body, was look­ing the other way. Toby could not have said why that should mat­ter, or why it made him want, very much, to have his board.

Then the gen­tle­man began to turn round; and Toby saw Miss Lydiard see it. She did not move her head. She put her hand on her brother’s arm, and stepped down off the hat­ter’s step into the crowd, be­hind him, as the trum­pets went; and the crowd took her east with the her­alds to­wards the City. When it had gone by, the gate­way was empty, and so was the step.

*  *  *  *  *

The Albe­marle and the Lon­don came into Salis­bury Square to­gether on the Tues­day, the first of Feb­ru­ary, with black rules round their title-pages, put in at the last mo­ment by print­ers who had been up all night.

Kit had bought the Lon­don him­self, at half a crown, out of his own forty pounds; since the Lud­gate had stopped, he said, a man had to fol­low the Mor­timers some­where, and Pel­ham would not. He read the tenth num­ber aloud with his back to the fire, as he had read every num­ber since the sum­mer, and said at the end of it that the Lon­don prin­ted them on bet­ter paper than Bal­dock ever had, and that it had not done them any harm.

When they had gone to bed she took the Albe­marle into the back room and read the fif­teenth num­ber of the Warden.

She had coun­ted the days to it. She had known since the first of Janu­ary that whatever he had to say to a sen­tence about a gen­tle­man by the water could not be in print be­fore the first of Feb­ru­ary; and she had told her­self, all through Janu­ary, that he would say noth­ing, be­cause there was noth­ing a gen­tle­man could say to it. She was wrong. It was on the third page.

She read it three times. Then she sat with the candle and tried to de­cide what it meant, and found, for the first time in her life, that she could not make the sum come out.

He was look­ing for some­body. That much was plain. She had seen him do it on the Monday, in the gate­way of the Temple, look­ing at the faces in the crowd one by one; and he was look­ing, as she had looked for his kit­chen, by going and see­ing, ask­ing nobody. But for whom? In Janu­ary, on the stair, she had priced the no­tion that he sat on his bench in the frost wait­ing for a young woman who had come about a place, and marked it down. She took it out again now, and looked at it. If the Author of the Warden was look­ing for the Author of the Mor­timers, then he was look­ing for a writer, as the whole of the Row was look­ing; and he would find a woman in a dyed gown two pair of stairs up over a law-sta­tioner’s, who had come down his area steps under false pre­tences, and taken his para­graph in August, and sent him the house­keeper’s ac­count, and put him by the water in a sen­tence. If he was look­ing for the young per­son from his pave­ment, he did not know that she was the Author; and he was look­ing for some­thing else al­to­gether, which she did not let her­self name.

She did not know which it was. She sat in the back room in her slate-col­oured gown until the candle was out,

and found that she did not know which she would mind more.

*  *  *  *  *

Mr. Kinross had con­duc­ted the Feb­ru­ary Albe­marle him­self, with Mr. Ogle, hav­ing found nobody else to do it; and he had read every word of his own maga­zine in proof for the first time, down to the ad­vert­ise­ments for trusses. On the first he bought the Lon­don at a book­seller’s in Pic­ca­dilly, and found the Mor­timers in it.

She had taken Rad­cliffe’s terms, then. She had gone up Bald­win’s stairs on the tenth, where he had re­fused to wait for her; and Rad­cliffe had seen her face, and paid her, and would keep it, as he kept everything. It was Kinross who had sent Rad­cliffe to her. Now Rad­cliffe would keep her from him too.

He read the tenth num­ber through, look­ing for a sen­tence that was his. It was Christ­mas in Mount Street: the fam­ily’s din­ner, and then the ser­vants’ hall’s, and what each of them cost, to the farth­ing. There was not a rail­ing in it, nor a pen­cil, nor any­body by the water; and he was more dis­ap­poin­ted than he would have liked any­body to know.

At half past three he went down to the garden. The boy did not come. It was the first of the four af­ter­noons at Mr. Sass’s; and Mr. Kinross sat on the second bench in the frost and understood that he had paid, among other things, to lose the only per­son in the Temple who was glad to see him.

Lady Ardoch came south on the Wed­nes­day, in black from her bon­net to her boots, hav­ing heard of the King at Don­caster and bought her mourn­ing at Stam­ford in a single af­ter­noon, which she said was the only good thing she had ever known come out of Stam­ford. She had Miss Lau­der with her, in black also, and Miss Lau­der’s father, who had busi­ness be­fore the Lords and did not see why the King’s dying should stop it.

Mr. Kinross went home to Gros­venor Square in the af­ter­noon to re­ceive them, be­cause there was nobody else to do it, and stood in his own draw­ing-room while his aunt told him that the Sea­son was ruined, that there would be no balls be­fore Easter and very likely none after it, that a girl could not be brought out in bom­bazine, and that he looked as though he had been sit­ting out of doors in a frost, which she sup­posed was the Temple. Miss Lau­der said that black be­came nobody, and looked at him to see whether he would con­tra­dict her; and he did not, be­cause he had not heard.

He was think­ing of Water Lane.

The next turn­ing east of it was Salis­bury Court. He had meant to take it on the Monday; and on the Monday they had pro­claimed the King.

(To be con­tin­ued.)