she had not, in the odious vulgar sense, "encouraged" him. Moreover
she couldn't talk of such things in that place, at that hour, and she
begged him not to make her regret her good-nature in staying over.
There were peculiarities in her position, considerations
insurmountable. She got rid of him with kind and confused words, and
afterwards, in the dull, humiliated night, he felt that he had been
put in his place. Women in her situation, women who after having
really loved and lost, usually lived on into the new dawns in which
old ghosts steal away. But there was something in his whimsical
neighbour that struck him as terribly invulnerable.



CHAPTER VII.



"I've had time to look a little further into what we're prepared to
do, and I find the case is one in which I should consider the
advisability of going to an extreme length," said Mr. Locket. Jersey
Villas the next morning had had the privilege of again receiving the
editor of the Promiscuous, and he sat once more at the davenport,
where the bone of contention, in the shape of a large, loose heap of
papers that showed how much they had been handled, was placed well in
view. "We shall see our way to offering you three hundred, but we
shouldn't, I must positively assure you, see it a single step
further."

Peter Baron, in his dressing-gown and slippers, with his hands in his
pockets, crept softly about the room, repeating, below his breath and