or
the invalid, and neither his soft first knock, designed to spare Mrs.
Melville's susceptibilities, nor his more vigorous second, had brought
Ellen to the door. He stepped back some paces and looked up at the three
dwarfish storeys of the silent little house, and alarm fell on him as he
saw that all the windows were dark. The reasoning portion of his mind
deliberated whether there could conceivably be any bedrooms looking out
to the back, but with the crazed imagination of a lover he saw
extravagant visions of the evils that might befall two fragile women
living alone. He pictured Ellen sitting up in bed, blinking at the
lanterns of masked men. Then it struck him as probable that Mrs.
Melville's sore throat might have developed into diphtheria, and that
Ellen had caught it, and the two women were even now lying helpless and
unattended in the dark house, and he brought down the knocker on the
door like a hammer. The little square, which a moment ago had seemed an
amusing setting for Ellen's quaintness, now seemed like a malignant
hunchback in its darkness and its leaning angles, and the branches of
the trees in the park beyond the railings swayed in the easy wind of a
fine night with that ironical air nature always assumes to persons
convulsed by human passion. But presently he heard the crazy staircase
creak under somebody's feet, and the next moment Ellen's face looked out
at him. She held a candle in her hand, and in its light he saw that her
face was marked with fatigue as by a blow and that her hair fell in
lank, curved strands about her shoulders.

She nearly sobbed when she saw him, but opened the door no wider than a
crack. "Oh, Richard! It's lovely to see you, but you mustn't come in.
They've taken poor mother away to the fever hospital with diphtheria."

"Diphtheria!" he exclaimed. "That's rum! It flashed through my mind as I
knocked that it was diphtheria she had."

"Isn't that curious!" she murmured, her eyes growing large and soft with
wonder. But her rationalism asserted itself and her glance grew shrewd
again. "Of course that's all nonsense. What more likely for you to
think, when you knew it was her throat that ailed her?" Seeing that in
her enthusiasm for a materialist conception of the universe she loosed
her grip of the doorhandle, he pushed past her, and took her candlestick
away from her and set it down with his flowers and papers on the
staircase. "Oh, you mustn't, you mustn't!" she cried under