the
mystery that was he. His eyes saw no more blue, and it was as if they
drew a black shutter over all the blue in his heart, blotting it out.
People became doomed phantoms, because the weather had changed and
because London knows how to play Cassandra to the spirit of many a man.
To Malling, as he presently turned to the right, Hornton Street looked
like an alley leading straight to the pit of despair, and when he tapped
on the blistered green door of the small house where the curate lived, it
was as if he tapped seeking admittance to all the sorrowful things that
had been brought into being to beset his life with blackness.

A neat servant-girl opened the door. There was a smell of roast mutton in
the passage. So far well. Malling took off his hat and coat, hung them up
on a hook indicated by the plump red hand of the maid, and then followed
her upstairs. The curate was in possession of the first floor.

Malling knew that it would be a case of folding-doors and perhaps of
curtains of imitation lace. It was a case of folding-doors. But there
was a dull green hue on the walls that surely bespoke Henry Chichester's
personal taste. There were bookcases, there were mezzotints, there were
engravings of well-known pictures, and there were armchairs not covered
with horsehair. There was also a cottage piano, severely nude. In the
center of the room stood a small square table covered with a cloth and
laid for two persons.

"I'll tell Mr. Chichester, sir."

The maid went out. From behind the folding-doors came to Malling's ears
the sound of splashing water, then a voice saying, certainly to the maid,
"Thank you, Ellen, I will come." And in three minutes Chichester was in
the room, apologizing.

"I was kept late in the parish. There's a good deal to do."

"You're not overworked?" asked Malling.

"Do I look so?" said Chichester, quickly.

He turned round and gazed at himself in an oval Venetian mirror which
was fixed to the wall just behind him. His manner for a moment was oddly
absorbed as he examined his face.

"London life tells on one, I suppose," he said, again turning. "We
change, of course, in appearance as we go on."

His blue eyes seemed to be seeking something in Malling's impenetrable
face.

"Do you think," he said, "I am much altered since we used to meet two
years ago? It would of course be natural enough if I were."

Malling looked at him for a minute steadily.

"In appearance, you mean?"

"Of co