ines of a night and even some of the less transient lodgers
ultimately escaped owing her money.

It was a silent and a dreary house, and although children would
doubtless have been a nuisance, Michael sometimes wished that the
landlady's strict regulation no longer to take them in could be relaxed.
All the five houses of Leppard Street seemed to be untenanted by
children, which certainly added a touch to their decrepitude. In
Greenarbor Court close at hand the pavements writhed with children, and
occasionally small predatory bands advanced as far as Leppard Street to
play in a half-hearted manner with some of the less unpromising rubbish
that was moldering there. On the steps of Number Three, two pale little
girls in stammel petticoats used to sit for hours over a grocer's shop
of grit and waste paper and refined mud. They apparently belonged to the
basement of Number Three, for Michael often saw them disappear below at
twilight. Michael thought of the children who swarmed above the walls of
the embankment before Paddington Station, and he wondered what sort of a
desolate appearance these five houses must present for voyagers to and
from Victoria. They must surely stand up very forbidding in abandonment
to those who were traveling back to their cherished dolls-houses in
Dulwich. From his bedroom window he could not actually see the trains,
but always he could hear their shrieking and their clangor, and he
looked almost with apprehension at St. Ursula in her high serene
four-poster reposing tranquilly upon the white wall. Nothing except the
trains could vex her sleep; for in this house was a perpetual silence.
Even when Mrs. Cleghorne was vociferously arguing with her husband, the
noise of her rage down in the basement among the quilts and coverlets
never penetrated beyond the door at the head of the inclosing staircase,
save in sounds of fury greatly minified. So silent was the house that
had it not been for the variety of the smells, Michael might easily have
supposed that it really was empty and that life here was indeed an
illusion. The smells, however, of onions or hot blankets or machine-oil
or tom-cats or dirty bicycles proclaimed emphatically that a community
shared these ascending mustard-colored walls, that human beings passed
along the stale landings to frowst behind those finger-stained doors of
salmon-pink. Sometimes, too, Michael emerging into the passage from his
room would hear from dingy altitudes descend