Page:Quiller-Couch - Noughts and Crosses.djvu/73

Rh a minute's silence. "She has aged very much. I really must begin to think of my end."

Outside, in the street, Joanna's husband was waiting for her—a dark, ragged man, with a five-act expression of face.

"Don't talk to me for a while," she begged. "I have been among ghosts."

"Ghosts?"

"They were much too dull to be real: and yet Oh, Jack, I feel glad for the first time that our child was taken! I might have left him there."

"What shall we sing?" asked the man, turning his face away.

"Something pious," Joanna answered with an ugly little laugh, "since we want our dinner. The public has still enough honesty left to pity piety." She stepped out into the middle of the street, facing her sisters' windows, and began, the man's voice chiming in at the third bar—