“Come round here, George.”

In the side of the studio was a very small window from which the girls, when unpresentable, would parley with early tradesmen.  Agg was at the window.  He could see only her head and neck, framed by the window.  Her short hair was tousled, and she held a dressing-gown tight about her neck.  For the first time she seemed to him like a real feminine girl, and her tones were soft as they never were when Marguerite was present with her.

“I’m very sorry,” she said.  “You woke me.  I was fast asleep.  You can’t come in.”

“Anything up?” he questioned, rather anxiously.  “Where’s Marguerite?”

“Oh, George!  A dreadful night!” she answered, almost plaintively, almost demanding sympathy from the male—­she, Agg!  “We were wakened up at two o’clock.  Mr. Prince came round to fetch Marguerite to go to No. 8.”

“To go to No. 8?” he repeated, frightened, and wondered why he should be frightened.  “What on earth for?”

“Mrs. Haim very ill!” Agg paused.  “Something about a baby.”

“And did she go?”

“Yes; she put on her things and went off at once.”

He was silent.  He felt the rough grip of destiny, of some strange power irresistible and unescapable, just as he had momentarily felt it in the basement of No. 8 more than eighteen months before, when the outraged Mr. Haim had quarrelled with him.  The mere idea of Marguerite being at No. 8 made him feel sick.  He no longer believed in his luck.  “How soon d’ye think she’ll be back?”

“I—­I don’t know, George.  I should have thought she’d have been back before this.”

“I’ll run round there,” he said curtly.

Agg was disconcertingly, astoundingly sympathetic.  Her attitude increased his disturbance.

II

When George rang the bell at No. 8 Alexandra Grove his mysterious qualms were intensified.  He dreaded the moment when the door should open, even though it should be opened by Marguerite herself.  And yet he had a tremendous desire to see Marguerite—­merely to look at her face, to examine it, to read it.  His summons was not answered.  He glanced about.  The steps were dirty.  The brass knob and the letter-flap had not been polished.  After a time he pushed up the flap and gazed within, and saw the interior which he knew so well and which he had not entered for so many months.  Nothing was changed in it, but it also had a dusty and neglected air.  Every detail roused his memory.  The door of what had once been his room was shut; he wondered what the room was now.  This house held the greatest part of his history.  It lived in his mind as vitally as even the boarding-house kept by his mother in a side-street in Brighton, romantic and miserable scene of his sensitive childhood.  It was a solemn house for him.  Through the basement window on a dark night he had first glimpsed Marguerite.  Unforgettable