e o'clock, she called in Torrington Square. She
approached the house in some anxiety, afraid of seeing the unhappy
little face of Tanqueray's wife looking out of the ground-floor window.

But Rose was not at the window. The curtains were drawn across,
obviously for the purpose of concealing Rose. A brougham waited before
the door.

Jane, as she entered, had a sense of secrecy and disturbance in the
house. There was secrecy and disturbance, too, in the manner of the
little shabby maid who told her that the doctor was in there with Mrs.
Tanqueray.

She was going away when Tanqueray came out of the sitting-room where the
doctor was.

"Don't go, Jinny," he said.

She searched his face.

"Oh, George, is anything the matter?"

He raised his eyebrows. His moustache tilted with them, upwards. She
recognized the gesture with which he put disagreeable things away from
him.

"Oh, dear me, no," he said.

"May I see her--afterwards?"

"Of course you may see her. But"--he smiled--"if you'll come up-stairs
you'll see Prothero."

She followed him to the room on the top floor, his refuge, pitched high
above Rose and her movements and her troubles.

He paused at the door.

"He may thank his stars, Jinny, that he came across Nina instead of
you."

"You think I'd better keep clear of him?"

"No. I think he'd better keep clear of you."

"George, is he really there?"

"Yes, he's there all right. He's caught. He's trapped. He can't get away
from you."

"I won't," she said. "It's dishonourable."

He laughed and they went in.

The poet was sitting in Tanqueray's low chair, facing them. He rose at
some length as they entered, and she discerned in his eyes the instinct
of savage flight. She herself would have turned and fled, but for the
singularity of such precipitance. She was afraid before this shyness of
the unlicked Celt, of the wild creature trapped and caught unaware, by
the guile she judged dishonourable.

Tanqueray had hardly introduced them before he was called off to the
doctor. He must leave them, he said, to each other.

They did not talk. They sat in an odd, intuitive silence, a silence that
had no awkwardness and no embarrassment. It was intimate, rather, and
vividly revealing. You would have said, coming upon them there, that
they had agreed upon this form of communion and enjoyed it.

It gave her leisure in which to take him more securely in. Her gaze was
obliquely attentive to his face, rugged an