He alone understood.  And his understanding gave him a melancholy, hopeless feeling of superiority, without at all lessening the strange conviction of guilt.  He had got himself gripped by destiny.  Destiny had captured all three of them.  But not the fourth.  The charwoman possessed the mysterious power to defy destiny.  Perhaps the power lay in her simplicity....  Fool!  An accursed negligence had eternally botched his high plans for peace and goodwill.

“Yes,” he said.  “I am.”

“And how long have you been engaged, sir?”

“Oh!  Since before Marguerite left here.”  He tried to talk naturally and calmly.

“Then you’ve been living here all this time like a spy—­a dirty spy.  My daughter behaves to us in an infamous manner.  She makes an open scandal.  And all the time you’re——­”

George suddenly became very angry.  And his anger relieved and delighted him.  With intense pleasure he felt his anger surging within him.  He frowned savagely.  His eyes blazed.  But he did not move.

“Excuse me,” he interrupted, with cold and dangerous fury.  “She didn’t do anything of the kind.”

Mr. Haim went wildly on, intimidated possibly by George’s defiance, but desperate: 

“And all the time, I say, you stay on here, deceiving us, spying on us.  Going every night to that wicked, cruel, shameful girl and tittle-tattling.  Do you suppose that if we’d had the slightest idea——­”

George walked up to him.

“I’m not going to stand here and listen to you talking about Marguerite like that.”

Their faces were rather close together.  George forced himself away by a terrific effort and left the kitchen.

“Jackanapes!”

George swung round, very pale.  Then with a hard laugh he departed.  He stood in the hall, and thought of Mrs. Haim upstairs.  The next moment he had got his hat and overcoat and was in the street.  A figure appeared in the gloom.  It was Mr. Prince.

“Hallo!  Going out?  How are things?”

“Oh!  Fine!” He could scarcely articulate.  A ghastly sob impeded the words.  Tears gushed into his eyes.  The dimly glowing oblongs in the dark facades of the Grove seemed unbearably tragic.

III

No. 6 Romney Studios, Manresa Road, Chelsea, was at the end of the narrow alley which, running at right angles to the road, had a blank wall on its left and Romney Studios on its right.  The studios themselves were nondescript shanties which reminded George of nothing so much as the office of a clerk-of-the-works nailed together anyhow on ground upon which a large building is in course of erection.  They were constructed of brick, wood, waterproof felting, and that adaptable material, corrugated iron.  No two were alike.  None had the least pretension to permanency, comeliness, or even architectural decency.  They were all horribly hot in summer, and they all needed immense