wondered if she ought to tell him so.  An unhappy silence fell upon her, which he did not notice because he was thinking how strange it was that even in this black lane, between blank walls through which they were passing, when he could not see her, when she was not saying anything, when he could get no personal intimation of her at all except that softness of tread, it was pleasant to be with her.  But he began to feel anxiety because of the squalor of the district.  This must be a mews, for there were sodden shreds of straw on the cobblestones, and surely that was the thud of sleeping horses’ hooves that sounded like the blows of soft hammers on soft anvils behind the high wooden doors.  If she lived near here she must be very poor.  But without embarrassment she turned to him in the shadow of a brick wall surmounted by broken hoarding and pointed down a paved entry to a dark archway pierced in what seemed, by the light that shone from a candle stuck in a bottle at an uncurtained window, to be a very mean little house.  “The Square’s through here,” she said.  “Come away in and I’ll find you a membership form for the Men’s League....”

Beyond the archway lay the queerest place.  It was a little box-like square, hardly forty paces across, on three sides of which small squat houses sat closely with a quarrelling air, as if each had to broaden its shoulders and press out its elbows for fear of being squeezed out by its neighbours and knocked backwards into the mews.  They sent out in front of them the slimmest slices of garden which left room for nothing but a paved walk from the entry and a fenced bed in the middle, where a lamp-post stood among some leggy laurels, which the rain was shaking as a terrier shakes a rat.  Huddled houses and winking lamp and agued bushes, all seemed alive and second cousins to the goblins.  On the fourth side were railings that evidently gave upon some sort of public park, for beyond them very tall trees which had not been stunted by garden soil sent up interminable stains on the white darkness, and beneath their drippings paced a policeman, a black figure walking with that appearance of moping stoicism that policemen wear at night.  He, too, participated in the fantasy of the place, for it seemed possible that he had never arrested anybody and never would; that his sole business was to keep away bad dreams from the little people who were sleeping in these little houses.  They were probably poor little people, for poverty keeps early hours, and in all the square there was but one lighted window.  And that he perceived, as he got his bearings, was in the house to which Ellen was leading him down the narrowest garden he had ever seen, a mere cheese straw of grass and gravel.  It was a corner house, and of all the houses in the square it looked the most put upon, the most relentlessly squeezed by its neighbours; yet Ellen opened the door and invited him in with something of an air.

“It’s very late,” he objected, but she had cried into the darkness, “Mother, I’ve brought a visitor!” and an inner door opened and let out light, and a voice that was as if dusk had fallen on Ellen’s voice said, “What’s that you say, Ellen?”