he hit upon an unhappy expedient.

He tried to persuade her to make a friend of a certain Doris Hayward,
instead of Lorraine.

Doris's brother had been Dudley's great friend in the days when both
were articled to the same profession, but a terrible accident had later
lain him on an invalid couch for the rest of his life.

When clerk of the works of one of London's great buildings, a heavy
crane had slipped and swung sideways, flinging him into the street
below. He was picked up and carried into the nearest hospital,
apparently dead, but he had presently come back, almost from the grave,
to drag out a weary life as an incurable on an invalid sofa.

Soon afterwards his father died, leaving Basil and his two sisters the
poor pittance of £50 a year between them.

Ethel, the elder, was already a Civil Service clerk at the General Post
Office, earning £110 a year, and on these two sums they had to subsist as
best they could.

Basil earned occasional guineas for copying work, when he was well
enough to stand the strain, and Doris remained at home with him in the
little Holloway flat, as nurse and housekeeper.

Dudley, with his usual lack of comprehension where women were
concerned, evolved what seemed to him an admirable plan, in which Hal
and Doris became great friends, thereby brightening poor Doris's dull
existence, and weaning Hal from her allegiance to the unstatisfactory