time during which her eyes
sustained his penetration without a relenting gleam, some lapse of
cruelty or of paradox. But with a passionate, inarticulate sound he
turned away, to remain, on the edge of the window, his hands in his
pockets, gazing defeatedly, doggedly, into the featureless night, into
the little black garden which had nothing to give him but a familiar
smell of damp. The warm darkness had no relief for him, and Miriam's
histrionic hardness flung him back against a fifth-rate world, against a
bedimmed, star-punctured nature which had no consolation--the bleared,
irresponsive eyes of the London firmament. For the brief space of his
glaring at these things he dumbly and helplessly raged. What he wanted
was something that was not in _that_ thick prospect. What was the
meaning of this sudden, offensive importunity of "art," this senseless,
mocking catch, like some irritating chorus of conspirators in a bad
opera, in which her voice was so incongruously conjoined with Nick's and
in which Biddy's sweet little pipe had not scrupled still more
bewilderingly to mingle? Art might yield to damnation: what commission
after all had he ever given it to better him or bother him? If the
pointless groan in which Peter exhaled a part of his humiliation had
been translated into words, these words would have been as heavily
charged with a genuine British mistrust of the uncanny principle as if
the poor fellow speaking them had never quitted his island. Several
acquired perceptions had struck a deep root in him, but an immemorial,
compact formation lay deeper still. He tried at the present hour to rest
on it spiritually, but found it inelastic; and at the very moment when
most conscious of this absence of the rebound or of any tolerable ease
he felt his vision solicited by an object which, as he immediately
guessed, could only add to the complication of things.

An undefined shape hovered before him in the garden, halfway between the
gate and the house; it remained outside of the broad shaft of lamplight
projected from the window. It wavered for a moment after it had become
aware of his observation and then whisked round the corner of the lodge.
This characteristic movement so effectually dispelled the mystery--it
could only be Mrs. Rooth who resorted to such conspicuous
secrecies--that, to feel the game up and his interview over, he had no
need to see the figure reappear on second thoughts and dodge about in
the dusk with a