reappeared
with an affirmative answer; and a third while an exiguous and hesitating
lift bore her up past a succession of shabby landings.

When the last was reached, and her guide had directed her down a winding
passage that smelt of sea-going luggage, she found herself before a door
through which a strong odour of tobacco reached her simultaneously with
the sounds of a suppressed altercation. Her knock was followed by a
silence, and after a minute or two the door was opened by a handsome
young man whose ruffled hair and general air of creased disorder led her
to conclude that he had just risen from a long-limbed sprawl on a sofa
strewn with tumbled cushions. This sofa, and a grand piano bearing a
basket of faded roses, a biscuit-tin and a devastated breakfast tray,
almost filled the narrow sitting-room, in the remaining corner of which
another man, short, swarthy and humble, sat examining the lining of his
hat.

Anna paused in doubt; but on her naming Mrs. Birch the young man
politely invited her to enter, at the same time casting an impatient
glance at the mute spectator in the background.

The latter, raising his eyes, which were round and bulging, fixed them,
not on the young man but on Anna, whom, for a moment, he scrutinized as
searchingly as the interior of his hat. Under his gaze she had the sense
of being minutely catalogued and valued; and the impression, when he
finally rose and moved toward the door, of having been accepted as
a better guarantee than he had had any reason to hope for. On the
threshold his glance crossed that of the young man in an exchange of
intelligence as full as it was rapid; and this brief scene left Anna so
oddly enlightened that she felt no surprise when her companion,
pushing an arm-chair forward, sociably asked her if she wouldn't have
a cigarette. Her polite refusal provoked the remark that he would,
if she'd no objection; and while he groped for matches in his loose
pockets, and behind the photographs and letters crowding the narrow
mantel-shelf, she ventured another enquiry for Mrs. Birch.

"Just a minute," he smiled; "I think the masseur's with her." He
spoke in a smooth denationalized English, which, like the look in his
long-lashed eyes and the promptness of his charming smile, suggested a
long training in all the arts of expediency. Having finally discovered a
match-box on the floor beside the sofa, he lit his cigarette and dropped
back among the cushions; and on Anna's