After a minute she struggled out of his arms and ran softly across the room. With her naked back to the door that led upstairs, she beckoned him and told him what he was to do. “You help me, we shall be rich,” she said. He smiled and nodded. He tried to finger her again but she caught his fingers and opened the door and led him upstairs. “You stay here quiet,” she said. In the old woman’s room she looked around her as if for the last time, at the cracked jug, the half-open window, the bed and the text on the wall. “One o’clock now,” she said into the old woman’s ear, and the blind eyes smiled. Helen put her fingers round the old woman’s throat. “One o’clock now,” she said, and with a sudden movement knocked the old woman’s head against the wall. It needed but three little knocks, and the head burst like an egg.

“What have you done?” cried the boy. Helen called for him to come in. He stared at the naked woman who cleaned her hands on the bed and at the blood that made a round, red stain on the wall, and screamed out in horror. “Be quiet,” said Helen, but he screamed again at her quiet voice and scurried downstairs.

“So Helen must fly,” she said to herself, “fly out of the old woman’s room.” She opened the window wider and stepped out. “I am flying,” she said.

But she was not flying.

THE FOLLOWERS

It was six o’clock on a winter’s evening. Thin, dingy rain spat and drizzled past the lighted street lamps. The pavements shone long and yellow. In squeaking goloshes, with mackintosh collars up and bowlers and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the offices bundled home against the thistly wind—

“Night, Mr. Macey.”

“Going my way, Charlie?”

“Ooh, there’s a pig of a night!”

“Goodnight, Mr. Swan”—and older men, clinging onto the big, black circular birds of their umbrellas, were wafted back, up the gaslit hills, to safe, hot, slippered, weatherproof hearths, and wives called Mother, and old, fond, fleabag dogs, and the wireless babbling.

Young women from the offices, who smelt of scent and powder and wet pixie hoods and hair, scuttled, giggling, arm-in-arm, after the hissing trams, and screeched as they splashed their stockings in the puddles rainbowed with oil between the slippery lines.

In a shopwindow, two girls undressed the dummies:

“Where are you going tonight?”

“Depends on Arthur. Up she comes.”

“Mind her cami-knicks, Edna …”

The blinds came down over another window.

A newsboy stood in a doorway, calling the news to nobody, very softly:

“Earthquake. Earthquake in Japan.”

Water from a chute dripped onto his sacking. He waited in his own pool of rain.