CHAPTER II


"LOUISA, the long and short of it is this," said Thorpe,
half an hour later: "you never did believe in me,
as a sister should do."

He was seated alone with this sister, in a small, low,
rather dismally-appointed room, half-heartedly lighted
by two flickering gasjets. They sat somewhat apart,
confronting a fireplace, where only the laid materials for
a fire disclosed themselves in the cold grate. Above the
mantel hung an enlarged photograph of a scowling old man.
Thorpe's gaze recurred automatically at brief intervals
to this portrait--which somehow produced the effect upon
him of responsibility for the cheerlessness of the room.
There were other pictures on the walls of which he was
dimly conscious--small, faded, old prints about Dido
and AEneas and Agamemnon, which seemed to be coming back
to him out of the mists of his childhood.

Vagrant impressions and associations of this childhood
strayed with quaint inconsequence across the field of his
preoccupied mind. The peculiar odour of the ancient book-shop
on the floor below remained like snuff in his nostrils.
Somewhere underneath, or in the wainscoting at the side,
he could hear the assiduous gnawing of a rat. Was it
the same rat, he wondered with a mental grin, that used
to keep him awake nights, in one of the rooms next to this,
with that same foolish noise, when he was a boy?