It was said by a Roman philosopher that the gods cannot busy themselves in mortal affairs, lest the turmoil of the market-place should disturb even the divine serenity of the dwellers on Olympus. It would seem that mortals, too, are often born with that temperament. In such people, as in persons born with one skin short, a touch is a bruise; the mere neighbourhood of spite, vulgarity, and crudity is like a spiritual blow to their sensibility. Such a temperament is, indeed, far enough from the divine-as far, in fact, as the gods of Olympus themselves from the altitude of Calvary.

Yet the extra skin that shall clothe the quivering nerves can be found. Wilmot had apparently found it in Avis, her little bird, that was going to lift her mother's life out of the rut of low achievement. For the moment the child's touch had driven away from her notice the noisy neighbourhood of the poor houses at the back of Dashpers, that usually brought to her ears all the sordid noises of squalid awakening this dawn, at any rate, was unsmirched. Smirched, that is, by nothing save a memory of how she had mocked at Tony yesterday, in a sudden fit of bitterness.

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The housekeeping money had sunk to a vanishing quantity, but she had determined to give the doctor a lesson. On returning to the midday meal, Dr. Borlace lifted the cover from the dish only to discover two pilchards, a fish he positively loathed, reposing on a layer of mashed potatoes.

"What's the meaning of this ?" he shouted.

"Two shillings for housekeeping won't run to roast beef," said his preceptress, sweetly, "and pilchards are very wholesome after all. Anyway, we must learn to live on them as other poor people do."

"What kind of creature are you turning out on my hands, Wilmot ?"

"Really, Tony, you are amusing to watch. Perhaps in time you will become really steady-going. I've been studying you lately; it's a most interesting course of observation."

"Don't do it," roared he, champing the highly flavoured food that his soul abhorred. "I won't be put under a microscope. It's positively indecent, I tell you, to botanize and geologize over a husband."

It appeared, however, that the housekeeping money would not again fall below five shillings at any one time of asking, but the memory of her mockery scorched her now.

Johanna, coming in with the early tea, suddenly became a personality, whose circumstances were of some import to her mistress.

"Johanna," she asked, leaning on her elbow to take the tray, "has your baby a pretty cot like mine?"

"No," she answered proudly; "she's much too small for any little chit of a cot. She takes a bed."

Wilmot laughed, for she understood the instinct of glorification that had suggested the answer.

"I'm going to fetch Elizabeth to see baby to-day. She's a gay creature, is your Elizabeth. The doctor says there isn't another child like her in the whole of Challacombe."

"And she sleeps in a padded cube sugar-box," said Johanna, quietly.

"I know, I know. Somehow baby has begun to teach me everything. Johanna, I can't imagine how you manage to pay your way. You pay five shillings a week for Elizabeth, that's thirteen pounds a year, and we only pay you fourteen pounds. She must have long ago grown out of the clothes Miss Penaluna gave her too."

"I've learnt to make clothes; you paid for me to do that."

Johanna had all a Frenchwoman's capacity for practical life. She kept the house spotless, learnt to cook at odd chances, a dish at a time, curry from William, cakes from Miss Penaluna's maid. But, with all her skill, there was a gulf that would not be bridged in her economies.

"I suppose I ought to have told, but when I've been using your sewing-machine, it wasn't all for my own sewing. I made a blouse for Miss Dorothy's Sarah, and she's paid me for it."

"You put me to shame, Johanna. You fight so all day and every hour."

"My dear life, I'll wear my fingers to the bone, but I won't go down. Some says to me, 'Go back to the old way and live like a sensible woman and be comfortable.' But I says, 'Thank'ee, but I've been an honest woman now for many a day.' For 'tis like the boys when they're after gulls' eggs, a foot here and a hand there, and so—up."

This explained the woman's thrift; in the battle of such as Johanna, the sixpence saved by much care is just a foothold-up.

As Wilmot sat that morning over the unpaid bills, the sunlight outside turned the air opaque with tawny gold. Then the gold shifted to a murky brown that made the outlines of the piers grow faint and wavering, though it was noon. The shouts of the men from the anchored fleet were muffled and the strike of the church clock was portentous. As the tide turned, the smell of weed drifted across the valley of house-roofs. It was high summer and stiflingly hot, but the doctor remained out all day, for the town was as sickly as the fog that the incoming trawlers reported to be gathering in the Channel as thick as a

blanket.

All day the weight of the clammy mist, the knowledge of the unpaid bills, the consciousness of the atmosphere of

dislike that surrounded her, pressed closer and closer on Wilmot. For Dashpers was fast becoming a beleaguered fortress, and to pay an afternoon call assumed the importance of a sortie by the garrison into the enemy's country. She felt glad to shut behind her the front door into the street, and to find herself in the peaceful shadow of the hall, with its long window of coloured glass and the thick walls that shut out the malicious spite of Challacombe. For now during the last three months scarcely one of the better-class people had called in the doctor; every one went to the helpless old Dr. Earwaker, now long past his work.

Wilmot awoke that night with what she thought at first was the roaring of siege guns, but which proved to be the noise of a rushing wind that battered the house of Dashpers as with a ram and blew the curtains of her window straight across the room. Hoarse shouts and the rush of nail-boots came up to her from the street below. As with hammering heart she held her watch to the night-light she saw that it was a few minutes past midnight, then she caught a shouted sentence: "There's a tidal wave running, and the wind behind it." The sultry yellow haze had brought fresh trouble to the town, for up the lower courts and wynds that abutted on the quay the wave would rush, leaving a foul deposit behind in the alleys and houses. Dashpers was on the hill far above the danger, but it was impossible to lie still in this turmoil, for beyond the battering shocks of wind that broke like great guns on the walls, there was the subdued roar of waters.

As she opened the door into the staircase she had a sudden sense of loneliness, and yet gazing over the stairhead she saw a line of light across the hall from the back sittingroom. Johanna slept in the rear of the house, up a separate staircase quite cut off from the rest of the house, but the doctor must be sitting up late, as he often did.

Wilmot stole softly down the stairs and pushed open the door, but the room was empty. As she stood trying to turn up the lamp to a brighter blaze, a key was inserted in the front door. It was Dr. Borlace and another man, and as they stood in the hall for a few minutes while the doctor lit the hall-lamp, she found her retreat upstairs cut off. Above the storm of rain and wind that even sounded at the back of the house, the roar of waters from the sea was like an echo of sound; above all there was something electric in the air to-night, something that thrilled the waiting nerves like a sudden summons to the unseen will.

"It's not enough," she heard the doctor's voice saying. He spoke loudly, for he imagined that Wilmot was safely asleep in her own room.

"Not enough, sir?" said the other in husky tones, that were penetrating for all the hesitating catch of the voice; it was a distinctive voice that a listener would always recognize. "I can't make it more, for I've offered more now than us will well know how to find. But help us must have for the lad if he's to weather to-night."

"He must be knocked to bits." The doctor spoke petulantly, Wilmot thought. "He'll die anyway, if what you say is true about the accident. I'm not going to risk my life to get to a patient that's probably beyond all human skill even by now."

"We risked ours, me and my mates, to get in and fetch help, and we didn't ask a brass farden for it, nuther." But for a slow sort of surprise the speaker's tone would have been truculent.

"The sea is your element, it isn't mine," said Dr. Borlace, beginning in an explanatory tone, and then breaking off into the shrug she knew well, which so often prefaced a piece of brutal candour in him; "and, anyway, what you offer wouldn't be enough to make it worth my