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taking her noon observation of the Harley bungalow.

“Prying old hen!” muttered Harley as he rose and closed the window pointedly.

Harley continued to stall for time. He changed his mind about posting the letter before lunch. He argued that any time before midnight would do. Besides, the Langham woman was watching, and he would feel like a murderer running the gauntlet of suspicious eyes. After all, what else did it amount to but murder—murder of a woman’s happiness and faith? The letter would strike to the heart as surely as a knife.

He wandered into the bedroom before he remembered that he had decided to lunch. He seemed to have developed a habit of wandering aimlessly about the house of late. Lunch. He would have lunch.

Lunch was a miserable affair.

Even before the earthquake the kitchenette had been hard to endure; now, with broken crockery and salt superimposed upon the stale breadcrumbs on the floor, the place was positively repulsive. Soiled saucepans and a frying-pan half-filled with congealed fat occupied the top of the gas stove in company with the ruined kettle. A three-weeks-old sheet of newspaper did duty as a table cover upon which had rested for days a pot of jam with its paper cover hanging in tatters from its rim, a bread board, three butter dishes, a tin of condensed milk and an accumulation of crumbs.

Cupboard doors were half-open, the dust of weeks throwing their panelling into bold relief; the dishes in the sink and on the board were an unlovely sight; the cleanliness of the tea-towels hanging on the rail behind the door was a reproach; and the lingering