On the Wednesday the spell of fine weather which had made London look strangely vivacious broke up, and in the evening rain fell with a gentle persistence.  Blank grayness took the town.  A breath as of deep autumn was in the air.  And the strange sadness of cities, which is like no other sadness, held the spirit of Evelyn Malling as he walked under an umbrella in the direction of Kensington High Street.  He walked, to shake off depression.  But in his effort he did not succeed.  All that he saw deepened his melancholy; the soldiers starting out vaguely from barracks, not knowing what to do, but free for a time, and hoping, a little heavily, for some adventure to break the military monotony of their lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to “take them out of themselves”—­pathetic desire of escape from the little prison, where the soul sits, picking its oakum sometimes, in its cell of flesh!—­young men making for the parks, workmen for the public houses, an old woman, in a cap, peering out of an upper window in Prince’s Gate; Italians with an organ, and a monkey that looked as if it were dying of nostalgia; women hurrying—­whither?—­with anxious faces, and bodies whose very shapes, and whose every movement, suggested, rather proclaimed, worry.

Malling knew it was the rain, the possessive grayness, which troubled his body to-night, and through his body troubled his spirit.  His nostrils inhaled the damp, and it seemed to go straight into his essence, into the mystery that was he.  His eyes saw no more blue, and it was as if they drew a black shutter over all the blue in his heart, blotting it out.  People became doomed phantoms, because the weather had changed and because London knows how to play Cassandra to the spirit of many a man.  To Malling, as he presently turned to the right, Hornton Street looked like an alley leading straight to the pit of despair, and when he tapped on the blistered green door of the small house where the curate lived, it was as if he tapped seeking admittance to all the sorrowful things that had been brought into being to beset his life with blackness.

A neat servant-girl opened the door.  There was a smell of roast mutton in the passage.  So far well.  Malling took off his hat and coat, hung them up on a hook indicated by the plump red hand of the maid, and then followed her upstairs.  The curate was in possession of the first floor.

Malling knew that it would be a case of folding-doors and perhaps of curtains of imitation lace.  It was a case of folding-doors.  But there was a dull green hue on the walls that surely bespoke Henry Chichester’s personal taste.  There were bookcases, there were mezzotints, there were engravings of well-known pictures, and there were armchairs not covered with horsehair.  There was also a cottage piano, severely nude.  In the center of the room stood a small square table covered with a cloth and laid for two persons.

“I’ll tell Mr. Chichester, sir.”