is horizon, leaving color and motion
behind them. With every step the street grew more empty, lonely and
colorless. Many of the windows that glimmered at them, passing, were
the blank windows of empty houses. Were they taking this way, this
curious roundabout out-of-the-world way, of dropping over into the
shipping which lay under the hill? For all she knew this might really be
his notion, for since they had left the garden gate, though they had
looked together at the light and color of the pictures moving past their
eyes, they had not exchanged a word.

But all at once he stopped at the intersection of two dusty streets, and
his eyes veered down the four perspectives like a voyageur taking his
soundings. Elegant as ever and odd enough, yet he wasn't any odder here
at the jumping off place of nowhere than he had appeared in the box at
the theater, or in the picture gallery. She had the clear impression all
at once that he wasn't too odd for anything.

"Here we are!" he said, and indicated with his glittering stick straight
before them a little house. It was low, as if it crouched against the
wind, faded and beaten by the sun to the drab of the rock itself, and
made so secret with tight-drawn curtains that it seemed to have shut
itself up against the world for ever. She wavered. She wasn't afraid of
herself out here, out-of-doors under the sky, but she was afraid that
those four walls might shut out her new unreasoning joy, might steal
away his new tenderness, and bring her back face to face with the same
ugly fact that had confronted her in her drawing-room.

"Oh, no," she said, and put her hands behind her with a determination
that she wasn't going to move.

"Oh, yes," he said, but he didn't smile. He looked at her quite gravely,
reproachfully, and the touch of his fingers on her arm was fine, was
delicate, as if to say, "I wouldn't harm you for the world."

She blushed a slow, painful crimson. She hadn't meant that. She hadn't
even thought of it; but, since he had, there was nothing for it but to
go in. The door shut behind her sharply, with a click like a little
trap; and she breathed such an atmosphere, flat, faint and stale, the
mere ghost of some fuller, more fragrant flavor. In the little anteroom
where they stood, whose faded ceiling all but brushed their heads, and
in the larger little room beyond the Nottingham lace curtains, prevailed
a mild shabbiness, a respectable decay. Curtains and table-cloths alike