He closed the door noiselessly. The house door was standing open, and
he went out beyond the porch, and stood where the monkshood rose at the
corner of the garden bed. From this point he could see the stranger
through the open window, still and dim, sitting head on hand. He had
not moved.

A number of children going along the road stopped and regarded the artist
curiously. A boatman exchanged civilities with him. He felt that possibly
his circumspect attitude and position looked peculiar and unaccountable.
Smoking, perhaps, might seem more natural. He drew pipe and pouch from
his pocket, filled the pipe slowly.

"I wonder," ... he said, with a scarcely perceptible loss of
complacency. "At any rate one must give him a chance." He struck a match
in the virile way, and proceeded to light his pipe.

He heard his landlady behind him, coming with his lamp lit from the
kitchen. He turned, gesticulating with his pipe, and stopped her at the
door of his sitting-room. He had some difficulty in explaining the
situation in whispers, for she did not know he had a visitor. She
retreated again with the lamp, still a little mystified to judge from her
manner, and he resumed his hovering at the corner of the porch, flushed
and less at his ease.

Long after he had smoked out his pipe, and when the bats were abroad,
curiosity dominated his complex hesitations, and he stole back into his
darkling sitting-room. He paused in the doorway. The stranger was still
in the same attitude, dark against the window. Save for the singing of
some sailors aboard one of the little slate-carrying ships in the harbour
the evening was very still. Outside, the spikes of monkshood and