Chapter 13

LEWISHAM INSISTS.

Ethel Henderson sat at her machine before the window of Mr. Lagume's
study, and stared blankly at the greys and blues of the November
twilight. Her face was white, her eyelids were red from recent
weeping, and her hands lay motionless in her lap. The door had just
slammed behind Lagune.

"Heigh-ho!" she said. "I wish I was dead. Oh! I wish I was out of it
all."

She became passive again. "I wonder what I have _done_," she said,
"that I should be punished like this."

She certainly looked anything but a Fate-haunted soul, being indeed
visibly and immediately a very pretty girl. Her head was shapely and
covered with curly dark hair, and the eyebrows above her hazel eyes
were clear and dark. Her lips were finely shaped, her mouth was not
too small to be expressive, her chin small, and her neck white and
full and pretty. There is no need to lay stress upon her nose--it
sufficed. She was of a mediocre height, sturdy rather than slender,
and her dress was of a pleasant, golden-brown material with the easy
sleeves and graceful line of those aesthetic days. And she sat at her
typewriter and wished she was dead and wondered what she had _done_.

The room was lined with bookshelves, and conspicuous therein were a
long row of foolish pretentious volumes, the "works" of Lagune--the
witless, meandering imitation of philosophy that occupied his
life. Along the cornices were busts of Plato, Socrates, and Newton.
Behind Ethel was the great man's desk with its green-shaded electric
light, and littered with proofs and copies of _Hesperus_, "A Paper for
Doubters," which, with her assistance, he edited, published, compiled,
wrote, and (without her help) paid for and read. A pen, flung down
forcibly, quivered erect with its one surviving nib in the blotting
pad. Mr. Lagune had flung it down.

The collapse of the previous night had distressed him dreadfully, and
ever and again before his retreat he had been breaking into passionate
monologue. The ruin of a life-work, it was, no less. Surely she had
known that Chaffery was a cheat. Had she not known? Silence. "After
so many kindnesses--"

She interrupted him with a wailing, "Oh, I know--I know."

But Lagune was remorseless and insisted she had betrayed him,
worse--made him ridiculous! Look at the "work" he had undertaken at
South Kensington--how could he go on with that now? How could he find
the heart? When his own typewriter sacrificed him to her stepfather's
trickery? "Trickery!"

The gesticulating hands became active, the grey eyes dilated with
indignation, the piping voice eloquent.

"If he hadn't