her materials. Only a patch of grass, a few trees and the sky; but you wake one morning and the boughs are drawn black and bold against the blue; and leaves are sharp as emeralds against the black; and the grass in the squares and the shrubs in the gardens repeat the same brilliant extravaganza; and it is all very eccentric and beautiful and daring. That is the way of a Cockney Spring, and when you are used to it the charm is undeniable.

One day Miss Quincey walked in Camden Town and noted the singular caprices of the Spring. Strange longings, freaks of the blood and brain, stirred within her at this bursting of the leaf. They led her into Camden Road, into the High Street, to the great shops where the virginal young fashions and the artificial flowers are. At this season Hunter's window blooms out in blouses of every imaginable colour and texture and form. There was one, a silk one, of so discreet and modest a mauve that you could have called it lavender. To say that it caught Miss Quincey's eye would be to wrong that maidenly garment. There was nothing blatant, nothing importunate in its behaviour. Gently, imperceptibly, it stole into the field of vision and stood there, delicately alluring. It could afford to wait. It had not even any pattern to speak of, only an indefinable white something, a dice, a diaper, a sprig. It was the sprig that touched her, tempted her.

Amongst the poorer ranks of Miss Quincey's profession the sumptuary laws are exceptionally severe. It is a crime, a treachery, to spend money on mere personal adornment. You are clothed, not for beauty's sake, but because the rigour of the climate and of custom equally require it. Miss Quincey's conscience pricked her all the time that she stood looking in at Hunter's window. Never before had she suffered so terrible a solicitation of the senses. It was as if all those dim and germinal desires had burst and blossomed in this sinful passion for a blouse. She resisted, faltered, resisted; turned away and turned back again. The blouse sat immovable on its wooden bust, absolute in its policy of reticence. Miss Quincey had just decided that it had a thought too much mauve in it, and was most successfully routing desire by depreciation of its object when a shopman stepped on to the stage, treading airily among the gauzes and the flowers. There was no artifice about the young man; it was in the dreamiest abstraction that he clasped that fair form round the collar and turned it to the light. It shuddered like a living thing; its violent mauve vanished in silver grey. The effect was irresistible. Miss Quincey was tempted beyond all endurance; and she fell. Once in possession of the blouse, its price, a guinea, paid over the counter, Miss Quincey was all discretion. She carried her treasure home in a pasteboard box concealed under her cape; lest its shameless arrival in Hunter's van should excite scandal and remark.

That night, behind a locked door, Miss Quincey sat up wrestling and battling with her blouse. To Miss Quincey in the watches of the night it seemed that a spirit of obstinate malevolence lurked in that deceitful garment. Like all the things in Hunter's shop, it was designed for conventional well-rounded womanhood. It repudiated the very idea of Miss Quincey; in every fold it expressed its contempt for her person; its collar was stiff with an invincible repugnance. Miss Quincey had to take it in where it went out, and let it out where it went in, to pinch, pull, humour and propitiate it before it would consent to cling to her diminished figure. When all was done she wrapped it in tissue paper and hid it away in a drawer out of sight, for the very thought of it frightened her. But when next she went to look at it she hardly knew it again. The malignity seemed all smoothed out of it; it lay there with its meek sleeves folded, the very picture of injured innocence and reproach. Miss Quincey thought she might get reconciled to it in time. A day might even come when she would be brave enough to wear it.

Not many days after, Miss Quincey might have been seen coming out of St. Sidwell's with a reserved and secret smile playing about her face; so secret and so reserved, that nobody, not even Miss Quincey, could tell what it was playing at.

Miss Quincey was meditating an audacity.

That night she took pen and paper up to her bedroom and sat down to write a little note. Sat down to write it and got up again; wrote it and tore it up, and sat down to write another. This she left open for such emendations and improvements as should occur to her in the night. Perhaps none did occur; perhaps she realized that a literary work loses its force and spontaneity in conscious elaboration; anyhow the note was put up just as it was and posted first thing in the morning at the pillar-box on her way to St. Sidwell's.

Old Martha was cleaning the steps as Miss Quincey went out; but Miss Quincey carefully avoided looking Martha's way. Like the ostrich she supposed that if she did not see Martha, Martha could not see her. But Martha had seen her. She saw everything. She had seen the note open on Miss Juliana's table by the window in the bedroom when she was drawing up the blind; she had seen the silk blouse lying in its tissue paper when she was tidying Miss Juliana's drawer; and that very afternoon she discovered a certain cake deposited by Miss Juliana in the dining-room cupboard with every circumstance of secrecy and disguise.

And Martha shook her old head and put that and that together, the blouse, the cake and the letter; though what connection there could possibly be between the three was more than Miss Juliana could have told her. Even to Martha the association was so singular that it pointed to some painful aberration of intellect on Miss Juliana's part.

As in duty bound, Martha brought up her latest discovery and laid it before Mrs. Moon. Beyond that she said nothing, indeed there was nothing to be said. The cake (it was of the expensive pound variety, crowned with a sugar turret and surrounded with almond fortifications) spoke for itself, though in an unknown language.

"What does that mean, Martha?"

"Miss Juliana, m'm, I suppose."

Martha pursed up her lips, suppressing the impertinence of her own private opinion and awaiting her mistress's with respect.

No doubt she would have heard it but that Miss Juliana happened to come in at that moment, and Mrs. Moon's attention was distracted by the really amazing spectacle presented by her niece. And Miss Juliana, who for five-and-twenty years had never appeared in anything but frowsy drab or dingy grey, Miss Juliana flaunting in silk at four o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Juliana, all shining and shimmering like a silver and mauve chameleon, was a sight to take anybody's breath away. Martha dearly loved a scene, for to be admitted to a scene was to be admitted to her mistress's confidence; but the excellent woman knew her place, and before that flagrant apparition she withdrew as she would have withdrawn from a family scandal.

Miss Quincey advanced timidly, for of course she knew that she had to cross that room under fire of criticism; but on the whole she was less abject than she might have been, for at the moment she was thinking of Dr. Cautley. He had actually accepted her kind invitation, and that fact explained and justified her; besides, she carried her Browning in her hand, and it made her feel decidedly more natural.

Mrs. Moon restrained her feelings until her niece had moved about a bit, and sat down by her enemy the cabinet, and presented herself in every possible aspect. The Old Lady's eyes lost no movement of the curious figure; when she had taken it in, grasped it in all its details, she began.

"Well, I declare, Juliana"—(five-and-twenty years ago she used to call her "Jooley," keeping the full name to