“The moment for which I had waited so long had at last come. I had my enemies within my power. Together they could protect each other, but singly they were at my mercy. I did not act, however, with undue precipitation. My plans were already formed. There is no satisfaction in vengeance unless the offender has time to realize who it is that strikes him, and why retribution has come upon him. I had my plans arranged by which I should have the opportunity of making the man who had wronged me understand that his old sin had found him out. It chanced that some days before a a gentleman who had been engaged in looking over some houses in the Brixton Road had dropped the key of one of them in my carriage. It was claimed that same evening, and returned; but in the interval I had taken a moulding of it, and had a duplicate constructed. By means of this I had access to at least one spot in this great city where I could rely upon being free from interruption. How to get Drebber to that house was the difficult problem which I had now to solve.

“He walked down the road and went into one or two liquor shops, staying for nearly half half an hour in the last of them. When he came out. he staggered in his walk, and was evidently pretty well on. There was a hansom just in front of me, and he hailed it. I followed it so close that the nose of my horse was within a yard of his driver the whole way. We rattled across Waterloo Bridge and through miles of streets, until, to my astonishment, we found ourselves back in the terrace in which he had boarded. I could not imagine what his intention was in returning there; but I went on and pulled up my cab a hundred yards or so so from the house. He entered it, and his hansom drove away. Give me a glass of water. if you please. My mouth gets dry with the talking.”

I handed him the glass, and he drank it down.

“That’s better,” he said. “Well, I waited tor a quarter of an hour, or more, when suddenly there came a noise like people struggling inside the house. Next moment the door was flung open and two men appeared, one of whom was Drebber, and the other was a young chap whom I had never seen before. This fellow had Drebber by the collar, and when they came to the head of the the steps he gave him a shove and a kick which sent him half across the road. ‘You hound!’ he cried, shaking his stick at him: ‘I’ll teach you to insult an honest girl!’ He was so hot that I think he would have thrashed Drebber with his cudgel. only that the cur staggered away down the road as fast as his legs would carry him. He ran as far as the corner, and then seeing my cab, he hailed me and jumped in. ‘Drive me to Halliday’s Private Hotel,’ said he.

“When I had him fairly inside my cab, my heart jumped so with joy that I feared feared lest at this last moment my aneurism might go wrong. I drove along slowly, weighing in my own mind what it was best to do. I might take him right out into the country, and there in some deserted lane have my last interview with him. I had almost decided upon this, when he solved the problem for me. The craze for drink had seized him again, and he ordered me to pull up outside a gin palace. He went in, leaving word that I should wait for him. There he remained until closing time. and when he came out he was so far gone that I I knew the game was in my own hands.

‘God, what it is to be a man!’ she cried.

‘What?’ exclaimed Ursula in surprise.

‘The freedom, the liberty, the mobility!’ cried Gudrun, strangely flushed and brilliant. ‘You’re a man, you want to do a thing, you do it. You haven’t the THOUSAND obstacles a woman has in front of her.’

Ursula wondered what was in Gudrun’s mind, to occasion this outburst. She could not understand.

‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ cried Gudrun, in swift refutation. ‘But supposing I did. Supposing I want to swim up that water. It is impossible, it is one of the impossibilities of life, for me to take my clothes off now and jump in. But isn’t it RIDICULOUS, doesn’t it simply prevent our living!’

She was so hot, so flushed, so furious, that Ursula was puzzled.

The two sisters went on, up the road. They were passing between the trees just below Shortlands. They looked up at the long, low house, dim and glamorous in the wet morning, its cedar trees slanting before the windows. Gudrun seemed to be studying it closely.

‘Don’t you think it’s attractive, Ursula?’ asked Gudrun.

‘Very,’ said Ursula. ‘Very peaceful and charming.’

‘It has form, too—it has a period.’

‘What period?’

‘Oh, eighteenth century, for certain; Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen, don’t you think?’

Ursula laughed.

‘Don’t you think so?’ repeated Gudrun.

‘Perhaps. But I don’t think the Criches fit the period. I know Gerald is putting in a private electric plant, for lighting the house, and is making all kinds of latest improvements.’

Gudrun shrugged her shoulders swiftly.

‘Of course,’ she said, ‘that’s quite inevitable.’

‘Quite,’ laughed Ursula. ‘He is several generations of youngness at one go. They hate him for it. He takes them all by the scruff of the neck, and fairly flings them along. He’ll have to die soon, when he’s made every possible improvement, and there will be nothing more to improve. He’s got GO, anyhow.’

‘Certainly, he’s got go,’ said Gudrun. ‘In fact I’ve never seen a man that showed signs of so much. The unfortunate thing is, where does his GO go to, what becomes of it?’

‘Oh I know,’ said Ursula. ‘It goes in applying the latest appliances!’

‘Exactly,’ said Gudrun.

‘You know he shot his brother?’ said Ursula.

‘Shot his brother?’ cried Gudrun, frowning as if in disapprobation.

‘Didn’t you know? Oh yes!—I thought you knew. He and his brother were playing together with a gun. He told his brother to look down the gun, and it was loaded, and blew the top of his head off. Isn’t it a horrible story?’

‘How fearful!’ cried Gudrun. ‘But it is long ago?’