and Critchett, and the gardener, and Ada, and the
whole vague populous host that keep one as definitely in one's place in
the world's economy as a firm-set pin the camphored moth. What his place
was to be only time could show. Meanwhile there was in this loneliness
at least a respite.

Solitude!--he bathed his weary bones in it. He laved his eyelids in
it, as in a woodland brook after the heat of noon. He sat on in calmest
reverie till his hunger was satisfied. Then, scattering out his last
crumbs to the birds from the barred window, he climbed upstairs again,
past his usual bedroom, past his detested guest room, up into the narrow
sweetness of Alice's, and flinging himself on her bed fell into a long
and dreamless sleep.

By ten next morning Lawford had bathed and dressed. And at half-past ten
he got up from Sheila's fat little French dictionary and his Memoirs to
answer Mrs Gull's summons on the area bell. The little woman stood with
arms folded over an empty and capacious bag, with an air of sustained
melancholy on her friendly face. She wished him a very nervous 'Good
morning,' and dived down into the kitchen. The hours dragged slowly by
in a silence broken only by an occasional ring at the bell. About three
she emerged from the house and climbed the area steps with her bag
hooked over her arm. He watched the little black figure out of
sight, watched a man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to push a
blue-printed circular through the letter-box. It had begun to rain a
little. He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window wide open
to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very slowly across
from line to line of the obscure French print.

Sabathier none the less, and in spite of his unintelligible
literariness, did begin to take shape and consistency. The man himself,
breathing, and thinking, began to live for Lawford even in those few
half-articulate pages, though not in quite so formidable a fashion as
Mr Bethany had summed him up. But as the west began to lighten with the
declining sun, the same old disquietude, the same old friendless and
foreboding ennui stole over Lawford's solitude once more. He shut his
books, placed a candlestick and two boxes of matches on the hall table,
lit a bead of gas, and went out into the rainy-sweet streets again.

At a mean little barber's with a pole above his lettered door he went
in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at the
crumb-lit