She went back to her own flat and packed her little cane trunk, and then went trotting over to No. 8 in case Ross had returned, and to No. 9 to see if Peter had come back. She kept on doing this for hours. Sometimes she packed her things, and sometimes she unpacked them. At intervals she read the cruel letter again, and about once in every half hour she rang the bells of No. 8 and 9.

“Like a cat on hot bricks!” Rush, the porter, told his bedridden wife in the basement. “What’s she want to go away for?”

“Everyone wants to get away some time,” said Mrs. Rush mildly. She sat up against four pillows and knitted baby socks for her daughter Ellen’s youngest, who was expecting in a month’s time. She was pale, and plump, and clean, with very little thin white hair screwed up into a pigtail, and a white flannelette nightgown trimmed with tatting.

“I don’t,” said Rush, “and no more do you. A lot of blasted nonsense I call it!”

Mrs. Rush opened her mouth to speak and shut it again. She hadn’t been out of her basement room for fifteen years, but that wasn’t to say she wouldn’t have liked to go. Men were all the same-if they didn’t fancy a thing themselves, then no one else wasn’t to fancy it neither. She began to turn the heel of the little woolly sock.

Ross Craddock came home just before three o’clock in the afternoon. He took himself up in the lift, and as soon as Miss Lucy heard the clang of the gate she opened her front door a crack and looked out. It was really Ross at last. Her heart bumped against her side and her breath caught in her throat. He looked as he always did, so very handsome and so masterful. It was ridiculous to feel afraid of someone she had seen christened, but there was something about Ross that made you feel as if you didn’t matter at all.