habit of theirs....  Fanciful suppositions!  At any rate he would not knock at the door of the studio, would not even enter the alley again.  What carried him into the Fulham Road and westwards as far as the Workhouse tower and the corner of Alexandra Grove?  Feet!  But surely the feet of another person, over which he had no control!  He went in the lamplit dimness of Alexandra Grove like a thief; he crept into it.  The silver had not yet died out of the sky; he could see it across the spaces between the dark houses; it was sad in exactly the same way as the sound of the mandolin had been sad.

What did he mean to do in the Grove?  Nothing!  He was just walking in it by chance.  He could indeed do nothing.  For if he rang at No. 8 old Haim would again confront him in the portico.  He passed by No. 8 on the opposite side of the road.  No light showed, except a very dim glow through the blind of the basement window to the left of the front door.  Those feet beneath him strolled across the road.  The basement window was wide open.  The blind being narrower than the window-frame, he could see, through the railings, into the room within.  He saw Marguerite.  She was sitting, in an uncomfortable posture, in the rather high-seated arm-chair in which formerly, when the room was her studio, she used to sit at her work.  Her head had dropped, on one shoulder.  She was asleep.  On the table a candle burned.  His heart behaved strangely.  He flushed.  All his flesh tingled.  The gate creaked horribly as he tiptoed into the patch of garden.  He leaned over the little chasm between the level of the garden and the window, and supported himself with a hand on the lower sash.  He pushed the blind sideways with the other hand.

“Marguerite!” in a whisper.  Then louder:  “Marguerite!”

She did not stir.  She was in a deep sleep.  Her hands hung limp.  Her face was very pale and very fatigued.  She liberated the same sadness as the sound of the mandolin and the gleam of silver in the June sky, but it was far more poignant.  At the spectacle of those weary and unconscious features and of the soft, bodily form, George’s resentment was annihilated.  He wondered at his resentment.  He was aware of nothing in himself but warm, protective love.  Tenderness surged out from the impenetrable secrecy of his heart, filled him, overflowed, and floated in waves towards the sleeper.  In the intense sadness, and in the uncertainty of events, he was happy.

An older man might have paused, but without hesitancy George put his foot on the window-sill, pushed down the window farther, and clambered into the room in which he had first seen Marguerite.  His hat, pressing backward the blind, fell off and bounced its hard felt on the floor, which at the edges was uncarpeted.  The noise of the hat and the general stir of George’s infraction disturbed Marguerite, who awoke and looked up.  The melancholy which she was exhaling suddenly vanished.  Her steady composure in the alarm delighted George.