wer. I saw
her tired eyes gazing into the dreariness of Oakley Street and felt a
pang strike through me. After a pause, in which again she said no word,
I added: "So, when you write the letter, you might hint, perhaps, that I
usually work all the morning, and--er--am not a very lively visitor!
Then she'll understand, you see." And I half-rose to return to my
diminutive study, where I was slaving, just then, at an absorbing
article on Comparative Aesthetic Values in the Blind and Deaf.

But Frances did not move. She kept her grey eyes upon Oakley Street
where the evening mist from the river drew mournful perspectives into
view. It was late October. We heard the omnibuses thundering across the
bridge. The monotony of that broad, characterless street seemed more
than usually depressing. Even in June sunshine it was dead, but with
autumn its melancholy soaked into every house between King's Road and
the Embankment. It washed thought into the past, instead of inviting it
hopefully towards the future. For me, its easy width was an avenue
through which nameless slums across the river sent creeping messages of
depression, and I always regarded it as Winter's main entrance into
London--fog, slush, gloom trooped down it every November, waving their
forbidding banners till March came to rout them.

Its one claim upon my love was that the south wind swept sometimes
unobstructed up it, soft with suggestions of the sea. These lugubrious
thoughts I naturally kept to myself, though I never ceased to regret the
little flat whose cheapness had seduced us. Now, as I watched my
sister's impassive face, I realized that perhaps she, too, felt as I
felt, yet, brave woman, without betraying it.

"And, look here, Fanny," I said, putting a hand upon her shoulder as I
crossed the room, "it would be the very thing for you. You're worn out
with catering and housekeeping. Mabel is your oldest friend, besides,
and you've hardly seen her since he died--"

"She's been abroad for a year, Bill, and only just came back," my sister
interposed. "She came back rather unexpectedly, though I never thought
she would go there to live--" She stopped abruptly. Clearly, she was
only speaking half her mind. "Probably," she went on, "Mabel wants to
pick up old links again."

"Naturally," I put in, "yourself chief among them." The veiled reference
to the house I let pass.

It involved discussing the dead man for one thing.

"I feel I ought to go anyhow," she r