his hats and caps and coats; and
passers through the small triangular square late at night, looking up
over the little serried row of wooden "To Let" hatchets, could see the
light within Oleron's red blinds, or else the sudden darkening of one
blind and the illumination of another, as Oleron, candlestick in hand,
passed from room to room, making final settlings of his furniture, or
preparing to resume the work that his removal had interrupted.

II

As far as the chief business of his life--his writing--was concerned,
Paul Oleron treated the world a good deal better than he was treated by
it; but he seldom took the trouble to strike a balance, or to compute how
far, at forty-four years of age, he was behind his points on the
handicap. To have done so wouldn't have altered matters, and it might
have depressed Oleron. He had chosen his path, and was committed to it
beyond possibility of withdrawal. Perhaps he had chosen it in the days
when he had been easily swayed by something a little disinterested, a
little generous, a little noble; and had he ever thought of questioning
himself he would still have held to it that a life without nobility and
generosity and disinterestedness was no life for him. Only quite
recently, and rarely, had he even vaguely suspected that there was more
in it than this; but it was no good anticipating the day when, he
supposed, he would reach that maximum point of his powers beyond which he
must inevitably decline, and be left face to face with the question
whether it would not have profited him better to have ruled his life
by less exigent ideals.

In the meantime, his removal into the old house with the insurance marks
built into its brick merely interrupted _Romilly Bishop_ at the fifteenth
chapter.

As this tall man with the lean, ascetic face moved about his new abode,
arranging, changing, altering, hardly yet into his working-stride again,
he gave the impression of almost spinster-like precision and nicety. For
twenty years past, in a score of lodgings, garrets, flats, and rooms
furnished and unfurnished, he had been accustomed to do many things for
himself, and he had discovered that it saves time and temper to be
methodical. He had arranged with the wife of the long-nosed Barrett, a
stout Welsh woman with a falsetto voice, the Merionethshire accent of
which long residence in London had not perceptibly modified, to come
across the square each morning to prepare his breakfast, and also