en
diffused light was a dull and numbing ache. He began, at successive hours
of the day, one after another, to lower his crimson blinds. He made short
and daring excursions in order to do this; but he was ever careful to
leave his retreat open, in case he should have sudden need of it.
Presently this lowering of the blinds had become a daily methodical
exercise, and his rooms, when he had been his round, had the blood-red
half-light of a photographer's darkroom.

One day, as he drew down the blind of his little study and backed in good
order out of the room again, he broke into a soft laugh.

"_That_ bilks Mr. Barrett!" he said; and the baffling of Barrett
continued to afford him mirth for an hour.

But on another day, soon after, he had a fright that left him trembling
also for an hour. He had seized the cord to darken the window over the
seat in which he had found the harp-bag, and was standing with his back
well protected in the embrasure, when he thought he saw the tail of a
black-and-white check skirt disappear round the corner of the house. He
could not be sure--had he run to the window of the other wall, which was
blinded, the skirt must have been already past--but he was _almost_ sure
that it was Elsie. He listened in an agony of suspense for her tread on
the stairs....

But no tread came, and after three or four minutes he drew a long breath
of relief.

"By Jove, but that would have compromised me horribly!" he muttered....

And he continued to mutter from time to time, "Horribly
compromising ... _no_ woman would stand that ... not _any_ kind of
woman ... oh, compromising in the extreme!"

Yet he was not happy. He could not have assigned the cause of the fits of
quiet weeping which took him sometimes; they came and went, like the
fitful illumination of the clouds that travelled over the square; and
perhaps, after all, if he was not happy, he was not unhappy. Before
he could be unhappy something must have been withdrawn, and nothing had
yet been withdrawn from him, for nothing had been granted. He was waiting
for that granting, in that flower-laden, frightfully enticing apartment
of his, with the pith-white walls tinged and subdued by the crimson
blinds to a blood-like gloom.

He paid no heed to it that his stock of money was running perilously low,
nor that he had ceased to work. Ceased to work? He had not ceased to
work. They knew very little about it who supposed that Oleron had ceased
to work! He w