There's time." "Oh a little less every day!" Miss Cutter had approached the table and glanced again at the gold and silver and the note, not indeed absolutely overlooking the two coppers.
"The balance," she put it, "the day after ?" "That very night if you like." "Then count on me." "Oh if I didn't--!" But the door closed on the dark idea.

Yearningly then, and only when it had done so, Miss Cutter took up the money.
She went out with it ten minutes later, and, the calls on her time being many, remained out so long that at half-past six she hadn't come back.
At that hour, on the other hand, Scott Homer knocked at her door, where her maid, who opened it with a weak pretence of holding it firm, ventured to announce to him, as a lesson well learnt, that he hadn't been expected till seven.

No lesson, none the less, could prevail against his native art.

He pleaded fatigue, her, the maid's, dreadful depressing London, and the need to curl up somewhere.

If she'd just leave him quiet half an hour that old sofa upstairs would do for it; of which he took quickly such effectual possession that when five minutes later she peeped, nervous for her broken vow, into the drawing-room, the faithless young woman found him extended at his length and peacefully asleep..