He left her to go and make up the kitchen fire, and get out the condensed milk and the tin of prepared coffee. Inwardly he said to himself: "As soon as she's up I'll go to New York and not come home till I've raised money enough to get back the hired woman and pay the doctor. She's probably right; it's nothing but worry and fatigue that's the matter with her." He fastened his mind on this conviction like a shipwrecked man clinging to a bit of wreckage. "She's anaemic, that's what she is… . What she needs is good food and rest, and a tonic." The more he repeated it to himself the stronger his conviction grew. He felt instinctively that he could not get on with his work without reassurance, and yet his work must be got on with to buy the reassurance… . The last gleam of inner light faded from his brain as it struggled with this dilemma. For a moment a vision brushed his eyes of the long summer afternoons at the Willows, with the sound of the bees in the last wistaria flowers, and Halo Tarrant sitting silent on the other side of the green velvet table, waiting for the pages as he passed them over… . But he dragged his thoughts away from the picture… . As soon as Laura Lou was up they breakfasted together; then he hurried off to the trolley… .

At "Storecraft" they told him the manager was in his office, and Vance flew up in the mirror-lined lift. He had not been in the place since he had taken Laura Lou there to see his bust at the "Tomorrowists'" exhibition. In the distorted vista of his life all that seemed to be years away from him. The lift shot him out on the manager's floor and he was shown into an office where Bunty Hayes throned before a vast desk of some rare highly polished wood. Vance was half aware of the ultramodern fittings, the sharp high lights and metallic glitter of the place; then he saw only Bunty Hayes, stout and dominant behind a shining telephone receiver and a row of electric bells.

"I want to know if you've got a job for me," Vance said.

Bunty Hayes rested both his short arms on the desk.

With a stout hairy hand he turned over a paperweight two or three times, and his round mouth framed the opening bar of an inaudible whistle.