knew could be sitting in the gallery.

The curtain rose again, and the last act began.

Chaliapine did not turn defeat into victory; no rabbit rose triumphantly, to satisfy the British public, out of a top-hat. Chaliapine led his people into a fire, and they were burned to death.

Some of them were frightened, and he had to comfort them, to hold them, and sustain them till the end. He had nothing at all to do it with, but he did sustain them. They all went into the flames, singing their disheartening music till the smoke covered them. Chaliapine sang longest, but there was nothing victorious in his last notes. They were very beautiful and final; then they weakened and were still.

The stillness went on for some time afterward. Everybody had been killed, and life had been so unendurable that they had faced death without much effort to avoid it. They could have avoided it if they had given up their faith. Their faith had vanished off the face of the earth, but they hadn't given it up.

Stella gave a long sigh of relief; she felt as if she had been saved from something abominable that might have happened.

Applause broke out all round them, a little uncertainly at first, because it was difficult for the audience to realize that the heavens weren't going to shoot open and do something definitely successful about it; but finally sustained and prolonged applause. Chaliapine had taken them all by storm. It was not the kind of storm that they were used to, but it was a storm.

"I love Russians," a lady exclaimed to Stella. "Such delightful people, don't you think, so full of color and what d' you call it?"

Eurydice shook herself impatiently like a dog after a plunge through water.

"Hurry! Let's get out of this," she said to Stella, "or I shall be rude to somebody. Idiots! Idiots! Don't they see that we've been listening to the defeat of the soul?"

"No, no," whispered Stella half to herself; "we've been listening to how it can't be defeated, how nothing touches it, not even death, not even despair, not even flames. The end of something that has never given in is victory."

They passed behind Marian outside the opera house, but Stella did not speak to her. She heard Sir Julian saying in a determined, resonant voice: "Well, of course I'm glad you liked it. Chaliapine is a good workman, but personally I don't think much of Russian music. It has a whine in it like a beggar's, sounds too much as if it had knocked under. My idea, you know, is not to knock under."

And Stella, slipping into the crowd, was aware again of a sharp pang of pity for him, as if she knew that, after all, his strength would meet and be consumed by fire.

CHAPTER III

Nothing in No. 9 Redcliffe Square ever got done; it happened, as leaves drop in autumn, or as dust accumulates, percolating softly and persistently through doors and windows.

The Warings had reached Redcliffe Square as accidentally as a tramp takes shelter under a hedge. Professor Waring, whose instinct was to burrow like a mole, blind and silent, into his researches, failed too completely to teach what he had discovered; and as he had never made the discovery that teaching was what he was paid for, his payments gradually ceased. When he found himself faced with an increasing family and a decreasing income, he thought of the South Kensington Museum. He thought of it as an habitual drunkard evicted for not paying his rent, thinks of the public house.

He brought his family as near to it as he could, dumped them down in a silent and slatternly street, and disappeared into the museum regularly every morning at nine. When he came out he wanted only cocoa, a back room, and the postage necessary for his researches. A Peruvian mummy went to his head like gin.

Mrs. Waring had been a gentle, dreamy girl with a strong religious tendency. She had married Professor Waring because he had wide blue eyes and a stoop and did not look at all coarse.

Professor Waring had married her because he wanted to get married a little and had noticed her at that time. He was under the impression that women managed households, meals, and children without bothering their husbands. Mrs. Waring tried not to bother her husband. She lost her religion because the professor hadn't any, and she thought at first he was sure to be right. When she ceased to have this magic certainty, she sought out fresh religions that told you you had everything you wanted when you knew you hadn't.

She got through maternity in a desultory way, with a great deal of ill health and enormous household bills. She did not manage anything, and when she was very unhappy she said that she was in tune with the infinite.

From their earliest years her children fended for themselves, Eurydice with storms of anguish and through a drastic series of childish epidemics; Cicely with a stolid, cold efficiency; and Stella with an intuitive gentleness so great as to hide a certain inner force.

About two hundred pounds a year trickled in on them from uncertain sources. Mrs. Waring never knew quite when to expect it, and when it came it soaked itself solemnly up on non-essentials. The children never had proper clothes or a suitable education. They were Egyptologists before they could spell, and the Koran was an open book to them when they should have been reading "The Water Babies."

The professor spent what he considered his share of their income upon hieroglyphics, and Mrs. Waring, never personally extravagant, bought quantities of little books to teach people how to live, how to develop the will, how to create a memory, and power through repose. They had one servant, who had to have wages and insisted every now and then upon a joint of meat.

There was no waste-paper basket in the house, and a great deal of linoleum. When Mrs. Waring made up her mind that she must be more economical, she always went out and bought linoleum. She had been told it was a great saving. She never tidied anything up or put anything away. What was lost was never seen again, or seen only when you were hunting for something else. It was like a gambler's system at Monte Carlo: you looked for a bootjack, and were rewarded by black treacle; or you played, as it were, for black treacle, and discovered the bootjack.

Mrs. Waring never finished anything; even her conversations, which began at breakfast, jogged on throughout the day, and were picked up at much the same spot in the evening. She had covered a quantity of ground, but she had invariably escaped her destination. Through long years of perpetual indecision she had nearly succeeded in outwitting time and space.

Nobody minded this attitude except Cicely. She fought against chaos from her youth up. They all dreaded her tongue and clung persistently to their habits. The professor fled earlier to the museum, sometimes in carpet slippers. Immediately after breakfast Mrs. Waring retired with a little book to an untidied bedroom.

Eurydice, dropping manuscripts, hair-ribbons, and defiance, escaped to a locked attic; and Stella remained as a gentle adjutant to her severer sister. Cicely did get a few things done. She saw that meals were cooked, windows opened, beds made, and clocks wound; but nothing continuous rewarded her efforts. The power of the human will is a small weapon against consolidated inertia.

For five years Cicely played upon No. 9 Redcliffe Square like an intermittent searchlight; then she gave it up, and became a student in a women's hospital. The household breathed a sigh of intense relief at her departure, and collapsed benevolently into chaos.

Nobody except Stella regretted it. The professor was openly thankful.

"She may become a student," he observed coldly when it was explained to him where Cicely had gone, "but she will never become a scholar. She has a superficial hunger for the definite.

"I really do not think it will be necessary for me to take my supper at a given hour. Stella will know that, whenever I ring my bell,