by an ugly, gravelled playground, were the familiar school buildings,
with the usual inscription carved in stone above the door. He laid his
hand upon the wooden gate and paused. From inside he could catch the
drone of children's voices. He glanced at his watch. It was barely twenty
minutes past four. For a moment he hesitated. Then he strolled on, and,
turning at the gate of an adjoining cottage, the nearest to the schools
of a little unlovely row, he tried the latch, found it yield to his
touch, and stepped inside. He closed the door behind him and turned, with
a little weary sigh of content, towards a large easy-chair drawn up in
front of the fire. For a single moment he seemed about to throw himself
into its depths--his long fingers, indeed, a little blue with the cold,
seemed already on their way towards the genial warmth of the flames. Then
he stopped short. He stood perfectly still in an attitude of arrested
motion, his eyes, wonderingly at first, and then with a strange,
unanalysable expression, seeming to embark upon a lengthened, a
scrupulous, an almost horrified estimate of his surroundings.

To the ordinary observer there would have been nothing remarkable in the
appearance of the little room, save its entirely unexpected air of luxury
and refinement. There was a small Chippendale sideboard against the wall,
a round, gate-legged table on which stood a blue china bowl filled with
pink roses, a couple of luxurious easy-chairs, some old prints upon the
wall. On the sideboard was a basket, as yet unpacked, filled with
hothouse fruit, and on a low settee by the side of one of the easy-chairs
were a little pile of reviews, several volumes of poetry, and a couple of
library books. In the centre of the mantelpiece was a photograph, the
photograph of a man a little older, perhaps, than this newly-arrived
visitor, with rounder face, dressed in country tweeds, a flower in his
buttonhole, the picture of a prosperous man, yet with a curious, almost
disturbing likeness to the pale, over-nervous, loose-framed youth whose