e came to a side street
which, according to Haim's description of the neighbourhood, ought to
have been Alexandra Grove. The large lamp on the corner, however, gave
no indication, nor in the darkness could any sign be seen on the blind
wall of either of the corner houses in Fulham Road. Doubtless in daytime
the street had a visible label, but the borough authorities evidently
believed that night endowed the stranger with powers of divination.
George turned hesitant down the mysterious gorge, which had two dim
lamps of its own, and which ended in a high wall, whereat could be
descried unattainable trees--possibly the grove of Alexandra. Silence
and a charmed stillness held the gorge, while in Fulham Road not a
hundred yards away omnibuses and an occasional hansom rattled along in
an ordinary world. George soon decided that he was not in Alexandra
Grove, on account of the size of the houses. He could not conceive Mr.
Haim owning one of them. They stood lofty in the gloom, in pairs,
secluded from the pavement by a stucco garden-wall and low bushes. They
were double-fronted, and their doors were at the summits of flights of
blanched steps that showed through the bars of iron gates. They had
three stories above a basement. Still, he looked for No. 8. But just as
the street had no name, so the houses had no numbers. No. 16 alone could
be distinguished; it had figures on its faintly illuminated fanlight. He
walked back, idly counting.

Then, amid the curtained and shuttered facades, he saw, across the road,
a bright beam from a basement. He crossed and peeped through a gate, and
an interior was suddenly revealed to him. Near the window of a room sat
a young woman bending over a table. A gas-jet on a bracket in the wall,
a few inches higher than her head and a foot distant from it, threw a
strong radiance on her face and hair. The luminous living picture,
framed by the window in blackness, instantly entranced him. All the
splendid images of the past faded and were confuted and invalidated and
destroyed by this intense reality so present and so near to him.
(Nevertheless, for a moment he thought of her as the daughter of Sir
Thomas More.) She was drawing. She was drawing with her whole mind and
heart. At intervals, scarcely moving her head, she would glance aside at
a paper to her left on the table.... She seemed to search it, to drag
some secret out of it, and then she would resume her drawing. She was
neither dark nor fair; sh