That afternoon she was left in peace. The next afternoon she found Dennis in the wicker chair, smoking his pipe, and reading the evening paper. The tobacco smoke drifted round her. It made her throat dry, and with that, and her haste, she began to cough. Remembering how she had choked, and how he had thumped her back, she broke into a sweat, thinking that he would hit again, but this time more roughly and shamelessly. But his reading absorbed him, and it was not till some minutes later that he laid down the paper and began to talk about a murder reported in it. The murdered woman was a street-walker, and elderly. This conjunction of age and profession enabled him to torment Miss St John very piquantly.

For the next few days she went recklessly to a teashop. But having been tempted by a sixpenny ice, she panicked at the thought of further extravagances, and went back to the little room. The little room faced west, and was stiflingly hot. It wilted even Dennis’s powers of disagreeable conversation. But he could torment in silence, too. Sometimes he would walk slowly round the table, staring at her as though she were on exhibition in a cage. Sometimes he feigned to make love to the dressmaker’s dummy, tweaking at the wrapper, and snuffing the brown holland bosom. Miss St John tried another expedient. This was to abjure her tea and sit in the Borough Gardens till dinner-time. Parched with thirst and stupefied with headache, she sat watching the tennis-players and the 109slow clock. Sometimes fragments of passing conversation lodged in her ears, and rang on there, meaningless as music. Then, one afternoon, the word murder alighted on her hearing. ‘Did you see that another of those wretched women has been murdered? It’s as bad as Jack the Ripper.’ ‘Oh well, I suppose the poor creatures expect it.’ The shadows of the two speakers flicked over her, and were gone. The words remained, and she sat nursing them, a figure of such self-forgetting and abject misery that a young man on his way to the tennis-court turned back and laid a half-crown on the bench beside her hand. Miss St John instantly rose to her feet and walked away.

After ten days’ resistance, she gave in, and told Betty, forcing herself to speak unconcernedly, that she would have her tea served in the little room as usual. ‘The old cat’s come back to her saucer,’ commented Betty, reporting this to Mrs Fry. Mrs Fry did not even smile. The heat and the busy season had knocked the spirit out of her. She looked careworn and listless, only her two curls retained their spruce appearance. ‘I know someone who won’t be best pleased,’ continued Betty. ‘Poor Mr Dennis, he doesn’t seem to be in the best of spirits anyhow, and I should think this’ll be the last straw.’ ‘Nonsense!’ exclaimed Mrs Fry, suddenly alert. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Dennis. He overdid himself on that week-end in town, that’s all.’