uldn't sub-let it
unfurnished. When did you get hold of this?"

"Yesterday afternoon," Concepcion answered. "Quick work. But these
feats can be accomplished. I've only taken it for a month. Hotels seem
to be all full. I couldn't open my own place at a moment's notice, and
I didn't mean to stay on at Lechford House, even if they'd asked me
to."

G.J.'s notion of the vastness and safety of London had received a
shock. He was now a very busy man, and would quite sincerely have told
anybody who questioned him on the point that he hadn't a moment to
call his own. Nevertheless, on the previous morning he had spent
a considerable time in searching for a nest in which to hide his
Christine and create romance; and he had come to this very flat.
More, there had been two flats to let in the block. He had declined
them--the better one because of the furniture, the worse because
it was impossibly small, and both because of the propinquity of the
garage. But supposing that he had taken one and Concepcion the other!
He recoiled at the thought....

Concepcion's new home, if not impossibly small, was small, and the
immensity and abundance of the furniture made it seem smaller than it
actually was. Each little room had the air of having been furnished
out of a huge and expensive second-hand emporium. No single style
prevailed. There were big carved and inlaid antique cabinets and
chests, big hanging crystal candelabra, and big pictures (some of
them apparently family portraits, the rest eighteenth-century
flower-pieces) in big gilt frames, with a multiplicity of occasional
tables and bric-a-brac. Gilt predominated. The ornate cornices were
gilded. Human beings had to move about like dwarfs on the tiny free
spaces of carpet between frowning cabinetry. The taste and the aim
of the author of this home defied deduction. In the first room a
charwoman was cleaning. Concepcion greeted her like a sister. In the
next room, whose window gave on to a blank wall, tea was laid for one
in front of a gas-fire. Concepcion reached down a cup and saucer from
a glazed cupboard and put a match to the spirit-lamp under the kettle.

"Let me see, the bedroom's up here, isn't it?" said G.J., pointing
along a passage that was like a tunnel.

Concepcion, yielding to his curiosity, turned on lights everywhere and
preceded him. The passage, hung with massive canvases, had scarcely
more than width enough for G.J.'s shoulders. The tiny bedroom
was muslined in