“Christie must be safe back now,” he thought; and there moved slowly across his innermost consciousness the evil suggestion that it was because of what he had read in that exercise-book that the girl’s thin frame seemed to him so unearthly tonight, her shadowy personality so remote. “She’s lodged in my mind, though, come what may,” he said to himself. “I will take Olwen to see her,” he thought. “She shall find out she’s not a leper!”

From Christie his mind rushed away to that little house in Saint Aldhelm’s Street. “I suppose Emma’s come home by now and Miss Gault’s in bed! I wish I’d gone back and kissed her, huddled up like that on his grave⁠—kissed her right on her deformed lip!”