and had conveyed it to
him. Was that true?

"Please!" said Arabian, holding open the door.

"I cannot come in," she said, in a dull, low voice.

Beyond the gap of the doorway there lay perhaps the unknown territory
called by Garstin the underworld. She remembered the piercingly shrewd
look Arabian had cast at her by the river, a look which had surely
included her with him in the region which lies outside all the barriers.
But she did not belong to that region. Despite her keen curiosities, her
resolute defiance of the conventions, her intensely modern determination
to live as she chose to live, she would never belong to it. A horrible
longing which she could not understand fought with the fear which
Garstin that day had dragged up from the depths of her to the surface.
But she now gave herself to the fear, and she repeated doggedly:

"I cannot come in."

But just at this moment her intention was changed, and her subsequent
action was determined in her by a trifling event, one of those events
which teach the world to believe in Fate. A door, the door of Mrs.
Birchington's flat, clicked behind her. Someone was coming out.

Instantly, driven by the thought "I mustn't be seen!" Miss Van Tuyn
stepped into Arabian's flat. She expected to hear the front door of it
close immediately behind her. But instead she heard Mrs. Birchington's
high soprano voice saying:

"Oh, how d'you do? Glad to meet you again!"

Quickly she opened the second door on the left and stepped into
Arabian's drawing-room. Why had he been so slow in shutting the front
door? She must have been seen. Certainly she had been seen by that
horrible Minnie Birchington. There would be more gossip. It would be all
over London that she was perpetually in this man's flat. Why had not
he shut the door directly she had stepped into the hall? Her nervous
tension found momentary relief in sudden violent anger against him, and
when at length she heard the door shut, and his footstep outside, she
turned round to meet him with fierce resolution.

"Why did you do that?"

"Beg pardon!" he said, gently, and looking surprised.

"Why didn't you shut the front door? That--Mrs. Birchington must have
seen me. I know she has seen me!"

"I had no time. I could not refuse to speak to her, could I? I could not
be rude to a lady."

"But I didn't wish her to see me!"

She was losing her self-control and knew it. She was angry with herself
as well as with him, but she coul