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“You’ll have to pay for them sometime,” Edith reminded her.

“I should worry. I’ve got to look like something if I’m going to go out at all.”

Edith, who had never thought things out before, had long hours to think now. And the one thing that seemed clear and undeniable was that she must not drive Mabel into debt. Debt was the curse of most of the girls she knew. As long as they were on their own they could manage. It was the burden of unpaid bills, lightly contracted, that drove so many of them wrong.

That night, while Mabel was asleep, she got up and cautiously lighted the gas. Then she took the boy’s photograph out of its hiding place and propped it on top of her trunk. For a long time she sat there, her chin in her hands, and looked at it.

It was the next day that she saw his name among the missing.

She did not cry, not at first. The time came when it seemed to her she did nothing else. But at first she only stared. She was too young and too strong to faint, but things went gray for her.

And gray they remained–through long spring days and eternal nights–days when Mabel slept all morning, rehearsed or played in the afternoons, was away all evening and far into the night. She did not eat or sleep. She spent money that was meant for food on papers and journals and searched for news. She made a frantic but ineffectual effort to get into the War Office.

She had received his letter two days after she had seen his name among the missing. She had hardly dared to open it, but having read it, for days she went round with a strange air of consecration that left Mabel uneasy.

“I wish you wouldn’t look like that!” she said one morning. “You get on my nerves.”

But as time went on the feeling that he was dead overcame everything else. She despaired, rather than grieved. And following despair came recklessness. He was dead. Nothing else mattered. Lethway, meeting her one day in Oxford Circus, almost passed her before he knew her. He stopped her then.

“Haven’t been sick, have you?”

“Me? No.”

“There’s something wrong.”

She did not deny it and he fell into step beside her.

“Doing anything?” he asked.

She shook her head. With all the power that was in her she was hating his tall figure, his heavy-lashed eyes, even the familiar ulster he wore.

“I wish you were a sensible young person,” he said. But something in the glance she gave him forbade his going on. It was not an ugly glance. Rather it was cold, appraising–even, if he had known it, despairing.

Lethway had been busy. She had been in the back of his mind rather often, but other things had crowded her out. This new glimpse of her fired him again, however. And she had a new quality that thrilled even through the callus of his soul. The very thing that had foredoomed her to failure in the theatre appealed to him strongly–a refinement, a something he did not analyse.

When she was about to leave him he detained her with a hand on her arm.

“You know you can always count on me, don’t you?” he said.

“I know I can’t,” she flashed back at him with a return of her old spirit.

“I’m crazy about you.”

“Old stuff!” she said coolly, and walked off. But there was a tug of fear at her heart. She told Mabel, but it was typical of the change that Mabel only shrugged her shoulders.

It was Lethway’s shrewdness that led to his next move. He had tried bullying, and failed. He had tried fear, with the same lack of effect. Now he tried kindness.

She distrusted him at first, but her starved heart was crying out for the very thing he offered her. As the weeks went on, with no news of Cecil, she accepted his death stoically at last. Something of her had died. But in a curious way the boy had put his mark on her. And as she grew more like the thing he had thought her to be the gulf between Mabel and herself widened. They had, at last, only in common their room, their struggle, the contacts of their daily life.