stopping short, as though from old custom, to look up. There was the
finest house in Harley Street which they were to have decorated with
their brass plates. If it had risen straight out of the ground at the
behest of his fancy he could not have been more painfully disconcerted.
He had never known before that he had avoided it. He knew it now, and
the realization was like the opening of a door into a dark and
unexplored chamber of his mind. He stood there shivering with cold,
and wet, and weariness. Who lived there now, he wondered? The old
back-numbers whom they were to have ousted so ruthlessly? Well, he
could find out. Someone lived there, at any rate. He could see a
light in one of the upper rooms. He crossed over and went up the steps
cautiously, like a thief. All the brass plates but one had gone. That
one shone brightly in the lamp-light, giving the door a one-eyed,
impish look. He could read the letters distinctly, and yet he had to
spell them over twice. It was as though she herself had suddenly
opened the door and spoken to him.

"Frances Wilmot, M.D."

Then he turned and walked away. But at the next corner he stopped and
looked up again at the lighted window. What freakish fancy had
possessed her----? Perhaps she was there now. He could see her in
the room that had been his enemy. And he had brief vision of himself
standing there in the empty street as he had done when he had loved her
so desperately, gazing up at that signal of warmth and comfort out of
the depths of his own desolateness.

He said "Francey!" under his breath, ironically, as though he had
uttered a child's "open-sesame!" to prove that there had never been any
magic in the word. But the sound hurt him.