. The lamp-light threw his shadow on to the grey, wet
pavements, and with the soap-box perched on his shoulders it was the
shadow of a huge hunchback. Then he shuffled off, and Stonehouse lost
sight of him almost at once in the dripping, uncertain darkness.

He walked on mechanically, aimlessly. He was tired out and dejected
beyond measure by this tragic encounter. It was not any immediate
affection for the old man, who had been no more to him than a strange
force driving him on for its own purposes; it was the others he had
evoked--and, above all, the sense of common misfortune which no man can
avert for ever. For the moment he lost faith in his own power to
maintain himself against a patient and faceless Nemesis.

It was morbid--the old terrifying signs of breakdown--the pointing
finger.

"Thus far and no further with your brain, Robert Stonehouse."

And then, suddenly, he found that he was in a familiar street, and,
stopping short, as though from old custom, to look up. There was the
finest house in Harley Street which they were to have decorated with
their brass plates. If it had risen straight out of the ground at the
behest of his fancy he could not have been more painfully disconcerted.
He had never known before that he had avoided it. He knew it now, and
the realization was like the opening of a door into a dark and
unexplored chamber of his mind. He stood there shivering with cold,
and wet, and weariness. Who lived there now, he wondered? The old
back-numbers whom they were to have ousted so ruthlessly? Well, he
could find out. Someone lived there, at any rate. He could see a
light in one of the upper rooms. He crossed over and went up the steps
cautiously, like a thief. All the brass plates but one had gone. That
one shone brightly in the lamp-light, giving the door a one-eyed,
impish look. He could read the letters distinctly, and yet he had to
spell them over twice. It was as though she herself had suddenly
opened the door and spoken to him.

"Frances Wilmot, M.D."

Then he turned and walked away. But at the next corner he stopped and
looked up again at the lighted window. What freakish fancy had
possessed her----? Perhaps she was there now. He could see her in
the room that had been his enemy. And he had brief vision of himself
standing there in the empty street as he had done when he had loved her
so desperately, gazing up at that signal of warmth and comfort out of
the