look at her face, to
examine it, to read it. His summons was not answered. He glanced about.
The steps were dirty. The brass knob and the letter-flap had not been
polished. After a time he pushed up the flap and gazed within, and saw
the interior which he knew so well and which he had not entered for so
many months. Nothing was changed in it, but it also had a dusty and
neglected air. Every detail roused his memory. The door of what had once
been his room was shut; he wondered what the room was now. This house
held the greatest part of his history. It lived in his mind as vitally
as even the boarding-house kept by his mother in a side-street in
Brighton, romantic and miserable scene of his sensitive childhood. It
was a solemn house for him. Through the basement window on a dark night
he had first glimpsed Marguerite. Unforgettable event! Unlike anything
else that had ever happened to anybody!... He heard a creak, and caught
sight through the letter-aperture of a pair of red slippers, and then
the lower half of a pair of trousers, descending the stairs. And he
dropped the flap hurriedly. Mr. Haim was coming to open the door. Mr.
Haim did open the door, started at the apparition of George, and stood
defensively and forbiddingly in the very centre of the doorway.

"Oh!" said George nervously. "How is Mrs. Haim?"

"Mrs. Haim is very ill indeed." The reply was emphatic and inimical.

"I'm sorry."

Mr. Haim said nothing further. George had not seen him since the
previous Saturday, having been excused by Mr. Enwright from the office
on Monday on account of examination work. He did not know that Mr. Haim
had not been to the office on Monday either. In the interval the man had
shockingly changed. He seemed much older, and weaker too; he seemed worn
out by acute anxiety. Nevertheless he so evidently resented sympathy
that George was not sympathetic, and regarded him coldly as a tiresome
old man. The official relations between the two had been rigorously
polite and formal. No reference had ever been made by either to the
quarrel in the basement or to the cause of it. And for the world in
general George's engagement had remained as secret as before. Marguerite
had not seen her father in the long interval, and George had seen only
the factotum of Lucas & Enwright. But he now saw Marguerite's father
again--a quite different person from the factotum.... Strange, how the
house seemed forlorn! 'Something about a baby,' Agg had said