peared on the landlady's grim face, with
its hungry eyes, sweetened by patience.

"When would she be coming in?" she asked.

"When do you think, Hilary?"

"I don't know," muttered Hilary. "The sooner the better--if it must be.
To-morrow, or the day after."

And with one look at the bed, covered by a piece of cheap red-and-yellow
tasselled tapestry, he went out into the street. The shower was over,
but the house faced north, and no sun was shining on it.

CHAPTER XXII

HILARY PUTS AN END TO IT

Like flies caught among the impalpable and smoky threads of cobwebs, so
men struggle in the webs of their own natures, giving here a start, there
a pitiful small jerking, long sustained, and failing into stillness.
Enmeshed they were born, enmeshed they die, fighting according to their
strength to the end; to fight in the hope of freedom, their joy; to die,
not knowing they are beaten, their reward. Nothing, too, is more to be
remarked than the manner in which Life devises for each man the
particular dilemmas most suited to his nature; that which to the man of
gross, decided, or fanatic turn of mind appears a simple sum, to the man
of delicate and speculative temper seems to have no answer.

So it was with Hilary in that special web wherein his spirit struggled,
sunrise unto sunset, and by moonlight afterward. Inclination, and the
circumstances of a life which had never forced him to grips with either
men or women, had detached him from the necessity for giving or taking
orders. He had almost lost the faculty. Life had been a picture with
blurred outlines melting into a softly shaded whole. Not for years had
anything seemed to him quite a case for "Yes" or "No." It had been his
creed, his delight, his business, too, to try and put himself in
everybody's place, so that now there were but few places where he did
not, speculatively speaking, feel at home.

Putting himself into the little model's place gave him but small delight.
Making due allowance for the sentiment men naturally import into their
appreciation of the lives of women, his conception of her place was
doubtless not so very wrong.

Here was a child, barely twenty years of age, country bred, neither a
lady nor quite a working-girl, without a home or relatives, according to
her own account--at all events, without those who were disposed to help
her--without apparently any sort of friend; helpless by nature, and whose
profession required a more tha