son, and
stayed therein for at least five minutes, emerging with a miraculously
achieved leisureliness. A few doors away was a somewhat new building, of
three storeys--the highest in the Square. The ground floor was an
ironmongery; it comprised also a side entrance, of which the door was
always open. This side entrance showed a brass-plate, "Q. Karkeek,
Solicitor." And the wire-blinds of the two windows of the first floor
also bore the words: "Q. Karkeek, Solicitor. Q. Karkeek, Solicitor." The
queerness of the name had attracted Hilda's attention several years
earlier, when the signs were fresh. It was an accident that she had
noticed it; she had not noticed the door-plates or the wire-blinds of
other solicitors. She did not know Mr. Q. Karkeek by sight, nor even
whether he was old or young, married or single, agreeable or repulsive.

The side entrance gave directly on to a long flight of naked stairs, and
up these stairs Hilda climbed into the unknown, towards the redoubtable
and the perilous. "I'm bound to be seen," she said to herself, "but I
don't care, and I _don't_ care!" At the top of the stairs was a passage,
at right angles, and then a glazed door with the legend in black
letters, "Q. Karkeek, Solicitor," and two other doors mysteriously
labelled "Private." She opened the glazed door, and saw a dirty
middle-aged man on a stool, and she said at once to him, in a harsh,
clear, deliberate voice, without giving herself time to reflect:

"I want to see Mr. Karkeek."

The man stared at her sourly, as if bewildered.

She said to herself: "I shan't be able to stand this excitement much
longer."

"You can't see Mr. Karkeek," said the man. "Mr. Karkeek's detained at
Hanbridge County Court. But if you're in such a hurry like, you'd better
see Mr. Cannon. It's Mr. Cannon as they generally do see. Who d'ye come
from, miss?"

"Come from?" Hilda repeated, unnerved.

"What name?"

She had not expected this. "I suppose I shall have to tell him!" she
said to herself, and aloud: "Lessways."

"Oh! Ah!" exclaimed the man. "Bless us! Yes!" It was as if he had said:
"Of course it's Lessways! And don't I know all about _you!_" And Hilda
was overwhelmed by the sense of the enormity of the folly which she was
committing.

The man swung half round on his stool, and seized the end of an
india-rubber tube which hung at the side of the battered and littered
desk, just under a gas-jet. He spoke low, like a conspirator, into the