“Were you really looking for accommodation?” demanded Mr. Haim suavely.

George hesitated.  “Yes.”

“Perhaps I have something that might suit you.”

Events, disguised as mere words, seemed to George to be pushing him forward.

“I should like to have a look at it,” he said.  He had to say it; there was no alternative.

Mr. Haim raised a hand.  “Any evening that happens to be convenient.”

“What about to-night, then?”

“Certainly,” Mr. Haim agreed.  For a moment George apprehended that Mr. Haim was going to invite him to dinner.  But Mr. Haim was not going to invite him to dinner.  “About nine, shall we say?” he suggested, with a courtliness softer even than usual.

Later, George said that he would lock up the office himself and leave the key with the housekeeper.

“You can’t miss the place,” said Mr. Haim on leaving.  “It’s between the Workhouse and the Redcliffe.”

II

At the corner dominated by the Queen’s Elm, which on the great route from Piccadilly Circus to Putney was a public-house and halt second only in importance to the Redcliffe Arms, night fell earlier than it ought to have done, owing to a vast rain-cloud over Chelsea.  A few drops descended, but so warm and so gently that they were not like real rain, and sentimentalists could not believe that they would wet.  People, arriving mysteriously out of darkness, gathered sparsely on the pavements, lingered a few moments, and were swallowed by omnibuses that bore them obscurely away.  At intervals an individual got out of an omnibus and adventured hurriedly forth and was lost in the gloom.  The omnibuses, all white, trotted on an inward curve to the pavement, stopped while the conductor, with hand raised to the bell-string, murmured apathetically the names of streets and of public-houses, and then they jerked off again on an outward curve to the impatient double ting of the bell.  To the east was a high defile of hospitals, and to the west the Workhouse tower faintly imprinted itself on the sombre sky.

The drops of rain grew very large and heavy, and the travellers, instead of waiting on the kerb, withdrew to the shelter of the wall of the Queen’s Elm.  George was now among the group, precipitated like the rest, as it were, out of the solution of London.  George was of the age which does not admit rain or which believes that it is immune from the usual consequences of exposure to rain.  When advised, especially by women, to defend himself against the treacheries of the weather, he always protested confidently that he would ‘be all right.’  Thus with a stick and a straw hat he would affront terrible dangers.  It was a species of valour which the event often justified.  Indeed he generally was all right.  But to-night, afoot on the way from South Kensington Station in a region quite unfamiliar to him, he was intimidated by the slapping menace of the big drops.  Reality faced him.  His scared thought ran:  “Unless I do something at once I shall get wet through.”  Impossible to appear drenched at old Haim’s!  So he had abandoned all his pretensions to a magical invulnerability, and rushed under the eave of the Queen’s Elm to join the omnibus group.