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 black—his race the Aberdeen, his name Alcibiades. He put up a respectful and adoring nose, and his mistress kissed him between the eyes.

“How could they try to part us,” she asked, “when there’s only us two left?”

Alcibiades, with swimming eyes, echoed in a little moan of true love the question: “How could they?”

The question was put again by both later in the day. Judy was to stay with an aunt while her mother sailed to Madeira to meet there the father returning from South Africa, full of wounds and honour, and to spend on the Island what was left of the winter. Now it was December.

A thick fog covered London with a veil of ugliness; the cabman was aggrieved and aggrieving—Alcibiades had tried to bite him—and Judy was on the verge of tears when the fog at last lifted, and allowed her to be driven to her aunt’s suburban house, yellow brickish, with a slate roof and a lean forecourt, wherein cypresses, stunted and blackened, spoke eloquently of lives more blank than the death whose emblem they were.

Through the slits of the drab Venetian blinds, gaslight streamed into the winter dusk.