walked quickly westwards - strained with the determination to face the
fact unflinchingly, and try to overcome the deep, insistent ache it
caused.

But the love of a lifetime is not dismissed at will, and looking a
little pitifully backward, though she was but twenty-eight, Ethel felt
she could not remember the time when she did not love Dudley Pritchard,
though it had perhaps only crystallised into the great feature of her
life at the time when, in silent, heroic endeavour, he had given of all
he had to win his friend back to life and health.

It was Dudley's careful savings that he had paid for the great
specialist and the big operation; Dudley's courage and devotion that
had nerved the stricken man to take up the awful burden of perpetual
invalidism; Dudley's never-failing encouragement and friendship that
helped him still to bear the dreary months of utter weariness, in the
little home kept together by his sister's salary.

High up in the dreary-looking block of flats in Holloway, attended
through the day by the erratic ministrations of Doris, and at night by
the yearning tenderness of Ethel, Basil Hayward dragged out a weary
martyrdom, that prayed only for release. In vain Ethel murmured over
him, that to work for him was a glory compared to what it would be to
live without him; in the silent, tedious hours of her absence, his soul
broke itself in hopeless, passionate protest against the decree that
compelled him to accept his daily bread at the hands of the sister he
would gladly have striven for day and night.

It as a martyrdom across which one can but draw a curtain, and stand
"eyes front". Look this way, look that, what answer is there, what