little woman stood with arms folded over an empty and capacious
bag, with an air of sustained melancholy on her friendly face.
She wished him a very nervous 'Good morning,' and dived down into
the kitchen. The hours dragged slowly by in a silence broken only
by an occasional ring at the bell. About three she emerged from
the house and climbed the area steps with her bag hooked over her
arm. He watched the little black figure out of sight, watched a
man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to push a blue-printed
circular through the letter-box. It had begun to rain a little.
He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window wide open
to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very slowly
across from line to line of the obscure French print.

Sabathier none the less, and in spite of his unintelligible
literariness, did begin to take shape and consistency. The man
himself, breathing, and thinking, began to live for Lawford even
in those few half-articulate pages, though not in quite so
formidable a fashion as Mr Bethany had summed him up. But as the
west began to lighten with the declining sun, the same old
disquietude, the same old friendless and foreboding ennui stole
over Lawford's solitude once more. He shut his books, placed a
candlestick and two boxes of matches on the hall table, lit a
bead of gas, and went out into the rainy-sweet streets again.

At a mean little barber's with a pole above his lettered door he
went in to be shaved. And a few steps further on he sat down at
the crumb-littered counter of a little baker's shop to have some
tea. It pleased him almost to childishness to find how easily he
could listen and even talk to the oiled and crimpy little barber,
and to the pretty, consumptive-looking, print-dressed baker's