which he was then drawing up, Stephen entered the
joint apartment with excessive caution, having first made all his
dispositions, and, stealing to the bed, slipped into it. He lay there,
offering himself congratulations that he had not awakened Cecilia, and
Cecilia, who was wide awake, knew by his unwonted carefulness that he
had come to some conclusion which he did not wish to impart to her.
Devoured, therefore, by disquiet, she lay sleepless till the clock
struck two.

The conclusion to which Stephen had come was this: Having twice
gone through the facts--Hilary's corporeal separation from Bianca
(communicated to him by Cecilia), cause unknowable; Hilary's interest
in the little model, cause unknown; her known poverty; her employment
by Mr. Stone; her tenancy of Mrs. Hughs' room; the latter's outburst to
Cecilia; Hughs' threat; and, finally, the girl's pretty clothes--he had
summed it up as just a common "plant," to which his brother's possibly
innocent, but in any case imprudent, conduct had laid him open. It was a
man's affair. He resolutely tried to look on the whole thing as unworthy
of attention, to feel that nothing would occur. He failed dismally,
for three reasons. First, his inherent love of regularity, of having
everything in proper order; secondly, his ingrained mistrust of and
aversion from Bianca; thirdly, his unavowed conviction, for all his
wish to be sympathetic to them, that the lower classes always wanted
something out of you. It was a question of how much they would want, and
whether it were wise to give them anything. He decided that it would not
be wise at all. What then? Impossible to say. It worried him. He had a
natural horror of any sort of scandal, and he was very fond of Hilary.
If only he knew the attitude Bianca would take up! He could not even
guess it.

Thus, on that Saturday afternoon, the 4th of May, he felt for once such
a positive aversion from the reading of reviews, as men will feel from
their usual occupations when their nerves have been disturbed. He stayed
late at Chambers, and came straight home outside an omnibus.

The tide of life was flowing in the town. The streets were awash with
wave on wave of humanity, sucked into a thousand crossing currents.
Here men and women were streaming out from the meeting of a religious
congress, there streaming in at the gates of some social function; like
bright water confined within long shelves of rock and dyed with myriad
scales of shif