on the centre of the table in an old Nankin
blue-and-white bowl he had; the rest he could arrange about the room:
there would just be time to see to all that before dressing.

Occupied with these thoughts, he turned into Vincent Square, which
looked vaster than ever with the murky haze, enclosed by its high
railings, and under a wide expanse of steel-blue sky, across which the
clouds were driving fast like ships in full sail scudding for harbour
before a storm. Against the mist below, the young and nearly leafless
trees showed flat, black profiles as of pressed seaweed, and the sky
immediately above the house-tops was tinged with a sullen red from miles
of lighted streets; from the river came the long-drawn tooting of tugs,
mingled with the more distant wail and hysterical shrieks of railway
engines on the Lambeth lines.

And now he reached the old semi-detached house in which he lodged, and
noticed for the first time how the trellis-work of the veranda made,
with the bared creepers and hanging baskets, a kind of decorative
pattern against the windows, which were suffused with a roseate glow
that looked warm and comfortable and hospitable. He wondered whether
Sylvia would notice it when she arrived.

He passed under the old wrought-iron arch that once held an oil-lamp,
and up a short but rather steep flight of steps, which led to a brick
porch built out at the side. Then he let himself in, and stood
spellbound with perplexed amazement,--for he was in a strange house.

In place of the modest passage with the yellow marble wall-paper, the
mahogany hat-stand, and the elderly barometer in a state of chronic
depression which he knew so well, he found an arched octagonal
entrance-hall with arabesques of blue, crimson, and gold, and
richly-embroidered hangings; the floor was marble, and from a shallow
basin of alabaster in the centre a perfumed fountain rose and fell with
a lulling patter.

"I must have mistaken the number," he thought, quite forgetting that his
latch-key had fitted, and he was just about to retreat before his
intrusion was discovered, when the hangings parted, and Mrs. Rapkin
presented herself, making so deplorably incongruous a figure in such
surroundings, and looking so bewildered and woebegone, that Horace, in
spite of his own increasing uneasiness, had some difficulty in keeping
his gravity.

"Oh, Mr. Ventimore, sir," she lamented; "whatever _will_ you go and do
next, I wonder? To think of your goi