In the closet that was built against the partition separating his room from Miss Bower’s, Hedger kept all his wearing apparel, some of it on hooks and hangers, some of it on the floor.  When he opened his closet door now-a-days, little dust-coloured insects flew out on downy wing, and he suspected that a brood of moths were hatching in his winter overcoat.  Mrs. Foley, the janitress, told him to bring down all his heavy clothes and she would give them a beating and hang them in the court.  The closet was in such disorder that he shunned the encounter, but one hot afternoon he set himself to the task.  First he threw out a pile of forgotten laundry and tied it up in a sheet.  The bundle stood as high as his middle when he had knotted the corners.  Then he got his shoes and overshoes together.  When he took his overcoat from its place against the partition, a long ray of yellow light shot across the dark enclosure,—­a knot hole, evidently, in the high wainscoating of the west room.  He had never noticed it before, and without realizing what he was doing, he stooped and squinted through it.

Yonder, in a pool of sunlight, stood his new neighbour, wholly unclad, doing exercises of some sort before a long gilt mirror.  Hedger did not happen to think how unpardonable it was of him to watch her.  Nudity was not improper to any one who had worked so much from the figure, and he continued to look, simply because he had never seen a woman’s body so beautiful as this one,—­positively glorious in action.  As she swung her arms and changed from one pivot of motion to another, muscular energy seemed to flow through her from her toes to her finger-tips.  The soft flush of exercise and the gold of afternoon sun played over her flesh together, enveloped her in a luminous mist which, as she turned and twisted, made now an arm, now a shoulder, now a thigh, dissolve in pure light and instantly recover its outline with the next gesture.  Hedger’s fingers curved as if he were holding a crayon; mentally he was doing the whole figure in a single running line, and the charcoal seemed to explode in his hand at the point where the energy of each gesture was discharged into the whirling disc of light, from a foot or shoulder, from the up-thrust chin or the lifted breasts.

He could not have told whether he watched her for six minutes or sixteen.  When her gymnastics were over, she paused to catch up a lock of hair that had come down, and examined with solicitude a little reddish mole that grew under her left arm-pit.  Then, with her hand on her hip, she walked unconcernedly across the room and disappeared through the door into her bedchamber.

Disappeared—­Don Hedger was crouching on his knees, staring at the golden shower which poured in through the west windows, at the lake of gold sleeping on the faded Turkish carpet.  The spot was enchanted; a vision out of Alexandria, out of the remote pagan past, had bathed itself there in Helianthine fire.