this memory-haunted room.

It was the big, light, airy, loft-like apartment which had attracted
him in these chambers fifteen years ago, when he had first come to
London from the Midlands, at the age of three-and-twenty. It was
here, five years later, that he had come straight back from the
Soho Registry Office with the young woman whom he had quixotically
drawn up out of a world--the nether world--where she had been
happier than she could ever hope to become with him. For Kitty
Brawle--her very surname was symbolic--was one of those doomed
creatures who love the mud, who never really wish to leave the
mud--who feel scraped and sad when clean.

Unhappy Sherston! The noblest thing he had ever done, or was ever
likely to do, in his life, proved, for a time at least, his undoing.
Kitty had made him from generous mean, from unsuspecting suspicious,
and during the wretched year they had spent together she had had
a disastrous effect on his work. At last, acting on the shrewd
advice of one of those instinctive men of the world of which Bohemia
is full, he had bought her a billet in a theatrical touring company.
There, by an extraordinary chance, Kitty made a tiny hit--sufficiently
of a hit to bring her from an American impresario a creditable
offer, contingent on her fare being paid to the States.

Gladly, how gladly only he himself had known--Sherston had taken
her passage in the Titanic, Kitty's own characteristic choice of a
boat. And he had done more. though short of money, he had given
Kitty a hundred pounds.

Four days after their parting had come the astounding news of the