ell and knocked.

"Are you sure? Can you see the hat-stand?"

"I can see it enough for that."

"Look here," George suggested, with false lightness, "I expect I could
get in through my window." His room was on the ground floor, and not
much agility was needed to clamber up to its ledge from the level of the
area. He might have searched his pockets again and discovered his
latchkey, but he would not. Sooner than admit a deception he would have
remained at the door with her all night.

"Think you could?"

"Yes. I could slide the window-catch."

He jumped down the steps and showed her how he could climb. In two
minutes he was opening the front door to her from the inside. She moved
towards him in the gloom.

"Oh! My portfolio!" She stopped, and bent down to the mat.

Then she busily lighted the little hall-lamp with his matches, and
hurried down, taking the matches, to the kitchen. After a few moments
George followed her; he was obliged to follow her. She had removed her
coat; it lay on the sole chair. The hat and blouse which she wore seemed
very vivid in the kitchen--vestiges of past glorious episodes in
concert-halls and hansoms. She had lighted the kitchen-lamp and was
standing apparently idle. The alarum-clock on the black mantelpiece
ticked noisily. The cat sat indifferently on the corner of the clean,
bare table. George hesitated in the doorway. He was extremely excited,
because the tremendous fact of what he had done and what she had
permitted, with all the implications, had to be explicitly acknowledged
between them. Of course it had to be acknowledged! They were both fully
aware of the thing, she as well as he, but spoken words must
authenticate its existence as only spoken words could.

She said, beginning sternly and finishing with a peculiar smile:

"I do think this business of father and Mrs. Lobley is going rather
far."

And George had a sudden new sense of the purely feminine adroitness of
women. In those words she had clearly conceded that their relations were
utterly changed. Never before had she made even the slightest, most
distant reference to the monstrous household actuality, unadmitted and
yet patent, of the wooing of Mrs. Lobley the charwoman by her father,
the widower of her mother. If Mr. Haim stayed away from home of an
evening, Mrs. Lobley was the siren who deflected him from the straight
domestic path. She knew it; George surmised it; the whole street had its
suspicions. But hithe