those outcasts of civilization to whom, in personal appearance, one might not deny he bore a certain resemblance.  To no one did he reveal his abiding-place, and it was the merest tradition of little authority that a man from Brodonowski’s had once been taken to his studio.  By no means a perspicuous man, and to be approached perhaps charily; yet Rainham, as his acquaintance progressed, found himself from time to time brought up with a certain surprise, as he discovered, under all his savage cynicism, his overweening devotion to a depressing theory, a very real vein of refinement, of delicate mundane sensibility, revealed perhaps in a chance phrase or diffidence, or more often in some curiously fine touch to canvas of his rare, audacious brush.  The incongruities of the man, his malice, his coarseness, his reckless generosity, gave Rainham much food for thought.  And, indeed, that parched empty August seemed full of problematical issues; and he had, on matters of more import than the enigmatic mind of a new friend, to be content at last to be tossed to and fro on the winds of vain conjecture.

Lightmark and the Sylvesters occupied him much; but beyond a brief note from Mrs. Sylvester in Lucerne, which told him nothing that he would know, there came to him no news from Switzerland.  In the matter of the girl whom he had befriended, recklessly, he told himself at times, difficulties multiplied.  A sort of dumb devil seemed to have entered into her, and, with the best will in the world, it was a merely pecuniary assistance which he could give her, half angry with himself the while that his indolent good nature (it appeared to him little else) forbade him to cast back at her what seemed a curious ingratitude almost passing the proverbial feminine perversity, and let her go her own way as she would have it.  On two occasions, since that chance meeting in the Park, he had called at the lodging in which he had helped her to install herself; and from the last he had come away with a distinct sense of failure.  Something had come between them, an alien influence was in the air, and the mystery which surrounded the girl, he saw with disappointment, she would not of her own accord assist to dissipate.  And yet there was nothing offensive in her attitude, only it had changed, lacked frankness.

One afternoon, finding that he could leave the dock early, he made another effort.  He stopped before one in a dingy row of small houses, uniformly depressing, in a street that ran into the Commercial Road, and rang the bell, which tinkled aggressively.  A slatternly woman, with a bandage round her head and an air of drunken servility, responded to his inquiry for “Mrs. Crichton” by ushering him into a small back parlour, in which a pale girl in black sat with her head bent over a typewriter.  She rose, as he came in, a little nervously, and stood, her thin hands clasped in front of her, looking up at him with expectant, terrified eyes.

“I am sorry to alarm you,” he said stiffly.  “I came to see if I could do anything for you, and to tell you once more that I can do nothing for you unless you are open with me, unless you help me.”