Lindsay's face expressed an instant's hesitation, he looked gravely the
other way. "And the address?" he said.

"Almost next door--we all live within bugle-call. The entrance is in
Crooked lane. Anybody will tell you."

At the door Ensign Sand was conspicuously waiting. Arnold said "Thanks"
again and passed out--she seemed to be holding it for him--and picked
his way over the gutters to the shop of his Chinaman opposite. From
there he watched the little company issue forth and turn into Crooked
lane, where the entrance was. It gave him a sense that she had her part
in this squalor, which was not altogether distressful in that it also
localised her in the warm, living, habitable world, and helped to make
her thinkable and attainable. Then he went to his room at the club and
found there a note from Miss Howe, written apparently to forgive him in
advance, to say that she had not expected him. "Friendly creature!" he
said as he turned out the lamp, and smiled in the dark to think that
already there was one who guessed, who knew.

One gropes in Crooked lane after the lights of Bentinck street have done
all that can be expected of them. There are various things to avoid,
washer-men's donkeys and pariah dogs, unyoked ticca-gharries, heaps of
rubbish, perhaps a leprous beggar. Lindsay, when he had surmounted
these, found himself at the entrance to a quadrangle which was
positively dark. He waylaid a sweeper slinking out; and the man showed
him where an open staircase ran down against the wall in one corner. It
was up there, he said, that the "tamasho-mems"[2] lived. There were
three tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Arnold's trivial coin,
and one sahib, but this was not the time for the tamasho--it was
finished. Lindsay mounted the first flight by faith, and paused at the