y respectable appearance they found what they were
looking for, a bed-sitting room furnished, advertised on a card in the
window. The door was opened by the landlady, a tall woman of narrow
build, with a West-Country accent, and a rather hungry sweetness running
through her hardness. They stood talking with her in a passage, whose
oilcloth of variegated pattern emitted a faint odour. The staircase
could be seen climbing steeply up past walls covered with a shining paper
cut by narrow red lines into small yellow squares. An almanack, of so
floral a design that nobody would surely want to steal it, hung on the
wall; below it was an umbrella stand without umbrellas. The dim little
passage led past two grimly closed doors painted rusty red to two
half-open doors with dull glass in their panels. Outside, in the street
from which they had mounted by stone steps, a shower of sleet had begun
to fall. Hilary shut the door, but the cold spirit of that shower had
already slipped into the bleak, narrow house.

"This is the apartment, m'm," said the landlady, opening the first of the
rusty-coloured doors. The room, which had a paper of blue roses on a
yellow ground, was separated from another room by double doors.

"I let the rooms together sometimes, but just now that room's taken--a
young gentleman in the City; that's why I'm able to let this cheap."

Cecilia looked at Hilary. "I hardly think---"

The landlady quickly turned the handles of the doors, showing that they
would not open.

"I keep the key," she said. "There's a bolt on both sides."

Reassured, Cecilia walked round the room as far as this was possible, for
it was practically all furniture. There was the same little wrinkle
across her nose as across Thyme's nose when she spoke of Hound Street.
Suddenly she caught sight of Hilary. He was standing with his back
against the door. On his face was a strange and bitter look, such as a
man might have on seeing the face of Ugliness herself, feeling that she
was not only without him, but within--a universal spirit; the look of a
man who had thought that he was chivalrous, and found that he was not; of
a leader about to give an order that he would not himself have executed.

Seeing that look, Cecilia said with some haste:

"It's all very nice and clean; it will do very well, I think. Seven
shillings a week, I believe you said. We will take it for a fortnight,
at all events."

The first glimmer of a smile ap