Do what she would, Joanna could not see it. She was anxious to see it, and by looking once or twice aside, tried to refresh her vision for seeing it. But no! The nodding, smiling ineloquent face of the woman baffled her each time. And though she gazed till she was almost in a stupor with gazing, she could see only a smiling nothing under a hat.

“She’s nothing!” cried the girl in her heart with fierce satisfaction. “She’s nothing … like Irene. How can he laugh and talk like that? Why does he bear it?”

Undoubtedly Louis appeared very sprightly. Was this his Society manner? Joanna shivered. She remembered his half amused strutting on the night she first met him. He was never like that with her now, she thanked Heaven!

But this was what he could not give up for her. A nausea crept over her.

Still she couldn’t turn and leave the place. She could not go till she had seen his face in recognition.

At that moment Louis turned with a roving eye and saw her. He made no visible movement. For perhaps three seconds he stood staring straight at her, maintaining the same apparently easy posture, yet Joanna knew him rigid in every sinew.

Then he shifted his hat very slightly on his head, and turned away. There had not come the faintest change on his face. It was less an acknowledgment than a denial. It would rob her of identity.

Joanna went out. She passed down the long room steadily, pushed herself through the swing doors, and after walking blindly for some minutes found herself in Regent Street. Here she paused for a moment as if overtaken in spite of her haste by what she most desired to escape. What a sickness was this! What a devastating disgust!

“Shall I bear it?” she asked. And she spoke the question again and again, in a low voice but audibly as if it relieved her. “Shall I bear it? Shall I bear it?”

That she could bear it – alas! even now she knew. Already the old excuses were beginning to marshal themselves for Louis. What should she have done in his place? What else could he have done? In the circumstances would it not have been the most distressing folly for him to have acted otherwise? And she herself was a party to circumstance. It was only because of her extraordinary lack of imagination that she now suffered so acutely. Nothing was altered.

Not only by her reason, but by her proved capacity for endurance, she knew she might bear it. How she could revel in the part of the oppressed and humble still! How she could hug to her bosom the secret jewel with its lustre turned inward, which is the inalienable treasure of the outcast! Was it not this that she had unwittingly coveted when for a penance she had kissed the blind beggar? Besides, did anything she had seen to-day make her need Louis less? And was it less true what he had said – “If you leave go of me, I shall be in the mire?”