Yet Louis did not offer her the drawing, and he took no notice when she said she would love to have it.

She puzzled over this. At home, unknown to him, she had a letter-case crammed with the treasured pen or pencil sketches with which her lover habitually illustrated his talk – scrawls done hastily on the backs of envelopes, on fly-leaves torn out of books, on any scrap of paper that came handy. But a serious drawing he had never given her, and there was no other material gift she could have wished to have from him. She had indeed been always deeply pleased, if also a little piqued, at his oblivion on the subject of presents. She had liked it that in their goings about he would let her pay her share of things. For somehow she had known that he was not mean. She also knew that in spite of the sums he was now earning, – sums that seemed enormous to her when he mentioned them, – he was often really short of money. His personal habits were of the simplest, yet he was continually harassed by debt, of which he had a puritanical hatred. He had told her frankly that his London household was maintained in a manner beyond his means.

But all this was no reason why he should refuse her the drawing she so wanted, and she now begged for it, rather timidly.

Louis looked at her and moved his eyes away again.

“My wife hates me to part with any of my stuff,” he said. “She has some kind of notion that it is her due, that if I were to die she would be provided for by having everything that wasn’t sold in the usual way. As we live, you see, I can’t save a halfpenny. She is queer about it perhaps but there it is. One way and another I owe her a good deal, and as I’ve been pretty filthy to her on the whole, I feel I must defer to her in this.”

A chasm gaped in the little silence that followed. With his first words Joanna had suffered a hideous sinking of spirit. The very tones of his voice seemed echoing in response to some unsuspected hollowness in the world. She had a picture of her lover stamping with shamefaced bravado upon a vault in which his own dead body lay. Involuntarily she shut her eyes for a second. But she gave no other sign or word. She never again asked him for a drawing.