he would. She had
not watched him for years without seeing how resolutely he put the
memory of pain or loss behind him whenever manly honour would allow.
The colonel's thin skin was his curse. Yet he wore it with a proud
indifference it took a good deal of warm affection to penetrate. Lydia
stood there and looked up and down the street. It had been a day almost
hot, surprising for the season, and she was dressed in conformity in
some kind of thin stuff with little dots of black. Her round young arms
were bare to the elbow, and there was a narrow lacy frill about her
neck. It was too warm really to need a hat or jacket, and this place was
informal enough, she thought, to do away with gloves. Having rapidly
decided that it was also a pity to cool resolution by returning to the
house for any conventional trappings, she stepped to the pavement and
went, with a light rapidity, along the road to Esther's.

She knew the way. When she reached the house she regarded it for a
moment from the opposite side of the street, and Jim Reardon, coming out
of his own gate for his evening's stroll to the Colonial Club, saw her
and crossed, instead of continuing on his own side as he ordinarily did.
She was a nymph-like vision of the twilight, and there was nothing of
the Addington girl about her unconsidered ease. Jim looked at her
deferentially, as he passed, a hand ready for his hat. But though Lydia
saw him she dismissed him as quickly, perhaps as no matter for
wonderment, and again because her mind was full of Esther. Now in the
haste that dares not linger, she crossed the street and ascended the
steps of the brick house. As she did so she was conscious of the
stillness within. It might have been a house embodied out of her own
dreams. But she did not ring, nor did she touch the circlet the brass
lion of a knocker held obligingly in his mouth. She lifted the heavy
latch, stepped in and shut the door behind her.

This was not the front entrance. The house stood on a corner, and this
door led into a little square hall with a colonial staircase of charming
right-angled turns going compactly up. Lydia looked into the room at her
right and the one at her left. They were large and nobly proportioned,
furnished in a faded harmony of antique forms. The arrangement of the
house, she fancied, might be much like the colonel's. But though she
thought like lightning in the excitement of her invasion, there was not
much clearness about it; her hea