They were all very tired, and went to bed early.  After great discussion it was decided that Marcus would sleep upon the lounge in the front parlor.  Trina would sleep with August, giving up her room to McTeague.  Selina went to her home, a block or so above the Sieppes’s.  At nine o’clock Mr. Sieppe showed McTeague to his room and left him to himself with a newly lighted candle.

For a long time after Mr. Sieppe had gone McTeague stood motionless in the middle of the room, his elbows pressed close to his sides, looking obliquely from the corners of his eyes.  He hardly dared to move.  He was in Trina’s room.

It was an ordinary little room.  A clean white matting was on the floor; gray paper, spotted with pink and green flowers, covered the walls.  In one corner, under a white netting, was a little bed, the woodwork gayly painted with knots of bright flowers.  Near it, against the wall, was a black walnut bureau.  A work-table with spiral legs stood by the window, which was hung with a green and gold window curtain.  Opposite the window the closet door stood ajar, while in the corner across from the bed was a tiny washstand with two clean towels.

And that was all.  But it was Trina’s room.  McTeague was in his lady’s bower; it seemed to him a little nest, intimate, discreet.  He felt hideously out of place.  He was an intruder; he, with his enormous feet, his colossal bones, his crude, brutal gestures.  The mere weight of his limbs, he was sure, would crush the little bed-stead like an eggshell.

Then, as this first sensation wore off, he began to feel the charm of the little chamber.  It was as though Trina were close by, but invisible.  McTeague felt all the delight of her presence without the embarrassment that usually accompanied it.  He was near to her—­nearer than he had ever been before.  He saw into her daily life, her little ways and manners, her habits, her very thoughts.  And was there not in the air of that room a certain faint perfume that he knew, that recalled her to his mind with marvellous vividness?

As he put the candle down upon the bureau he saw her hairbrush lying there.  Instantly he picked it up, and, without knowing why, held it to his face.  With what a delicious odor was it redolent!  That heavy, enervating odor of her hair—­her wonderful, royal hair!  The smell of that little hairbrush was talismanic.  He had but to close his eyes to see her as distinctly as in a mirror.  He saw her tiny, round figure, dressed all in black—­for, curiously enough, it was his very first impression of Trina that came back to him now—­not the Trina of the later occasions, not the Trina of the blue cloth skirt and white sailor.  He saw her as he had seen her the day that Marcus had introduced them:  saw her pale, round face; her narrow, half-open eyes, blue like the eyes of a baby; her tiny, pale ears, suggestive of anaemia; the freckles across the bridge of her nose; her pale lips; the tiara of royal black hair; and, above all, the delicious poise of the head, tipped back as though by the weight of all that hair—­the poise that thrust out her chin a little, with the movement that was so confiding, so innocent, so nearly infantile.