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we’re married, I ought to know more about Harry’s past.”
    â€œHas he got a past?” enquired Mr Joyce uncooperatively.
    â€œHe admitted it to me, Dadda, the night he proposed.”
    â€œThen that should be enough,” said Mr Joyce. “He hasn’t got a present, has he?”
    â€œNo, I’m sure not,” said Miranda positively. “From his mother I know how he spends every minute.”
    â€œPoor devil,” said Mr Joyce. After knowing Harry Gibson off and on for years, on closer acquaintance he’d taken quite a liking to him. (He’d enjoyed, at the family engagement-party, hearing Harry tell unsuitable stories to old Beatrice, and looked forward to hearing him tell her a few more.) Miranda’s probings into Harry’s past, and even more the rapidly-organised supervision-system now revealed, had the effect of putting him on Harry’s side. “You leave well alone,” Mr Joyce adjured his daughter. “I consider six months a very proper time myself. You leave well alone—and let sleeping dogs lie.”
    Miranda hesitated a moment, then jumped up and kissed him affectionately.
    â€œWise old Dadda, who always knows best!”
    â€œAnd don’t go hiring detectives,” added old man Joyce.
    5
    It will thus be seen that Miranda too had her anxieties. She didn’t exactly think her big fierce lover would get away—she trusted Dadda too well for that; but what she did fear was the additional three months’ strain on Mr Gibson’s moral character. Such a passionate man as he was—a man who’d had a mistress! When he told her that was all washed up, Miranda believed him; but would it stay washed up, for half a year? Wasn’t some interim backsliding at least possible? Without, she assured herself, the least jealousy or curiosity, Miranda couldn’t help feeling she ought to know more of the facts—just in case Harry ever needed her help.
    She didn’t hire detectives. It was a course she had indeed envisaged—actually half-way through Chopin’s Nocturne in G Major ; at the very moment when Harry surprised a glance between the mater and Aunt Beatrice—but only with her father acting as principal, to bear if need be the brunt of Harry’s wrath; and wise old Dadda had made his position lamentably clear. What other courses lay open? Pumping old Mrs Gibson was no use, the latter, with excellent sense, having contrived to know exactly as little about her son’s private life as Harry hoped she did. “Two nights from home every week? In Leeds,” said Mrs Gibson firmly. “How glad he is too, now no more tiresome railway-travel!” Miranda was left anxious; her happiness in the possession of a big fierce lover was by no means unflawed.
    Upon Dolores this postponement—for such she instinctively felt it to be—of the Gibson-Joyce nuptials worked almost as disquietingly. Dolores, daily searching the social columns of her newspaper, and finding at last the announcement she dreaded, read of a mid-December wedding with something like terror. For next month or in six months, what difference?—while to know her beloved for six months more still not irretrievably another’s prolonged the worst of her anguish, which was to hope. There was nothing that could happen, in six months, to restore him to her; yet until those six months were run out, how could she find the graveyard-peace of hopelessness?
    The one person completely happy at this time was old Mrs Gibson. Old Mrs Gibson was rejuvenated. Wearing her best dress so continually that she would soon need another—continually popping round to Knightsbridge, even though she dined there most evenings, for coffee and cakes with Auntie Bee—old Mrs Gibson bloomed. Her berry-brown eye gleamed bright; her small spare frame eagerly braced itself to meet every demand. It was she who tirelessly accompanied Miranda on