vaguely.
And it was as though something that Mr. Haim and his wife had concealed
had burst from its concealment and horrified and put a curse on the
whole Grove. Something not at all nice! What in the name of decent
propriety was that slippered old man doing with a baby? George would not
picture to himself Mrs. Haim lying upstairs. He did not care to think of
Marguerite secretly active somewhere in one of those rooms. But she was
there; she was initiated. He did not criticize her.

"I should like to see Marguerite," he said at length. Despite himself he
had a guilty feeling.

"My daughter!" Mr. Haim took up the heavy role.

"Only for a minute," said George boyishly, and irritated by his own
boyishness.

"You can't see her, sir."

"But if she knows I'm here, she'll come to me," George insisted. He saw
that the old man's hatred of him was undiminished. Indeed, time had
probably strengthened it.

"You can't see her, sir. This is my house."

George considered himself infinitely more mature than in the November of
1901 when the old man had worsted him. And yet he was no more equal to
this situation than he had been to the former one.

"But what am I to do, then?" he demanded, not fiercely, but crossly.

"What are you to do? Don't ask me, sir. My wife is very ill indeed, and
you come down the Grove making noise enough to wake the dead"--he
indicated the motor-bicycle, of which the silencer was admittedly
defective--"and you want to see my daughter. My daughter has more
important work to do than to see you. I never heard of such callousness.
If you want to communicate with my daughter you had better write--so
long as she stays in this house."

Mr. Haim shut the door, which rendered his advantage over George
complete.

From the post office nearly opposite the end of the Grove George
dispatched a reply-paid telegram to Marguerite:

"Where and when can I see you?--GEORGE. Russell Square."

It seemed a feeble retort to Mr. Haim, but he could think of nothing
better.

On the way up town he suddenly felt, not hungry, but empty, and he
called in at a tea-shop. He was the only customer, in a great expanse of
marble-topped tables. He sat down at a marble-topped table. On the
marble-topped table next to him were twenty-four sugar-basins, and on
the next to that a large number of brass bells, and on another one an
infinity of cruets. A very slatternly woman was washing the linoleum in
a corner of the floor. Two thin, w