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"* lived. There were three
tamasho-mems, he continued, responding to Lindsay'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 landing to
avoid collision with a heavy body descending. He inquired Miss Filbert's
whereabouts from this person, who providentially lighted a cigar,
disclosing himself a bald Armenian in tusser silk trousers and a dirty
shirt, presumably, Lindsay thought, the landlord. At all events he
had the information, Lindsay was to keep straight on, it was the third
storey. Duff kept straight on in a spirit of caution, and just missed
treading upon the fattest rat in the heathen parish of St. John's. At
the top he saw a light and hastened; it shone from an open door at the
side of a passage. The partition in which the door was came considerably
short of the ceiling, and from the top of it to the window opposite
stretched a line of garments to dry, of pungent odour and infantile
pattern. Lindsay dared no farther, but lifted up his voice in the Indian
way to summon a servant, "Qui hai?"# he called, "Qui hai?"