event!  Unlike anything else that had ever happened to anybody!...  He heard a creak, and caught sight through the letter-aperture of a pair of red slippers, and then the lower half of a pair of trousers, descending the stairs.  And he dropped the flap hurriedly.  Mr. Haim was coming to open the door.  Mr. Haim did open the door, started at the apparition of George, and stood defensively and forbiddingly in the very centre of the doorway.

“Oh!” said George nervously.  “How is Mrs. Haim?”

“Mrs. Haim is very ill indeed.”  The reply was emphatic and inimical.

“I’m sorry.”

Mr. Haim said nothing further.  George had not seen him since the previous Saturday, having been excused by Mr. Enwright from the office on Monday on account of examination work.  He did not know that Mr. Haim had not been to the office on Monday either.  In the interval the man had shockingly changed.  He seemed much older, and weaker too; he seemed worn out by acute anxiety.  Nevertheless he so evidently resented sympathy that George was not sympathetic, and regarded him coldly as a tiresome old man.  The official relations between the two had been rigorously polite and formal.  No reference had ever been made by either to the quarrel in the basement or to the cause of it.  And for the world in general George’s engagement had remained as secret as before.  Marguerite had not seen her father in the long interval, and George had seen only the factotum of Lucas & Enwright.  But he now saw Marguerite’s father again—­a quite different person from the factotum....  Strange, how the house seemed forlorn!  ‘Something about a baby,’ Agg had said vaguely.  And it was as though something that Mr. Haim and his wife had concealed had burst from its concealment and horrified and put a curse on the whole Grove.  Something not at all nice!  What in the name of decent propriety was that slippered old man doing with a baby?  George would not picture to himself Mrs. Haim lying upstairs.  He did not care to think of Marguerite secretly active somewhere in one of those rooms.  But she was there; she was initiated.  He did not criticize her.

“I should like to see Marguerite,” he said at length.  Despite himself he had a guilty feeling.

“My daughter!” Mr. Haim took up the heavy role.

“Only for a minute,” said George boyishly, and irritated by his own boyishness.

“You can’t see her, sir.”

“But if she knows I’m here, she’ll come to me,” George insisted.  He saw that the old man’s hatred of him was undiminished.  Indeed, time had probably strengthened it.

“You can’t see her, sir.  This is my house.”

George considered himself infinitely more mature than in the November of 1901 when the old man had worsted him.  And yet he was no more equal to this situation than he had been to the former one.

“But what am I to do, then?” he demanded, not fiercely, but crossly.