She had stripped him; then she stabbed.

To hide his shame and his hurt, he turned his face from her and left her.  So strangely and so drunkenly did he go, with such a mist in his eyes, and such anguish and fury in his heart and brain, that on the threshold of the Harden library he stumbled past Miss Palliser without seeing her.

She found Lucia standing where he had left her, looking at a little roll of pale green paper that her fingers curled and uncurled.

“Lucia,” she said, “what have you done to him?”

Lucia let the little roll of paper fall from her fingers to the floor.

“I don’t know, Kitty.  Something horrible, I think.”

BOOK III

THE HOUSE OF BONDAGE

CHAPTER XXXVII

Mrs. Downey’s boarding-house was the light of Tavistock Place, Bloomsbury.  In the brown monotony of the street it stood out splendid, conspicuous.  Its door and half its front were painted a beautiful, a remarkable pea-green, while its door knob and door-knocker were of polished brass.  Mrs. Downey’s boarding-house knew nothing of concealment or disguise.  Every evening, at the hour of seven, through its ground-floor window it offered to the world a scene of stupefying brilliance.  The blinds were up, the curtains half-drawn, revealing the allurements of the interior.

From both sides of the street, the entire length of the dinner-table was visible.  Above it, a handsome gilt gaselier spread out its branches, and on this gaselier as many as three gas-jets burned furiously at once.  In the intense illumination the faces of the boarders could be distinctly seen.  They sat, as it were, transfigured, in a nebulous whorl or glory of yellow light.  It fell on the high collars, the quite remarkably high collars of the young gentlemen, and on those gay, those positively hilarious blouses which the young ladies at Mrs. Downey’s wear.  Beside the water-bottles and tumblers of red glass it lay like a rosy shadow on the cloth.  It gave back their green again to the aspidistras that, rising from a ruche of pink paper, formed the central ornament of the table.  It made a luminous body of Mrs. Downey’s face.  The graver values were not sacrificed to this joyous expenditure of gas-light, for the wall-paper (the design was in chocolate, on a ground of ochre) sustained the note of fundamental melancholy.  At the back of the apartment, immediately behind Mrs. Downey, an immense mahogany sideboard shone wine-dark in a gorgeous gloom.  On the sideboard stood a Family Bible, and on the Family Bible a tea-urn, a tea-urn that might have been silver.  There was design in this arrangement; but for the Bible the tea-urn would have been obliterated by Mrs. Downey; thus elevated, it closed, it crowned the vista with a beauty that was final, monumental and supreme.