the house to which Ellen was leading him down the narrowest garden he
had ever seen, a mere cheese straw of grass and gravel. It was a corner
house, and of all the houses in the square it looked the most put upon,
the most relentlessly squeezed by its neighbours; yet Ellen opened the
door and invited him in with something of an air.

"It's very late," he objected, but she had cried into the darkness,
"Mother, I've brought a visitor!" and an inner door opened and let out
light, and a voice that was as if dusk had fallen on Ellen's voice said,
"What's that you say, Ellen?"

"I've brought a visitor, mother," she repeated. "Go on in; I'll not be a
minute finding the form.... Mother, this is Mr. Yaverland, the client
from Rio. He says he'll join the Men's League and I'm just going to find
him a membership form."

She went to a desk in the corner of the room and dashed it open, and
fell to rummaging in a pile of papers with such noisy haste that he knew
she was afraid she ought not to have asked him in and was trying to
carry it off under a pretence of urgency; and he found himself facing a
little woman who wore a shawl in the low-spirited Scotch way, as if it
were a badge of despondency, and who was saying, "Good evening, Mr.
Yaverland. Will you not sit down? I'm ashamed the hall gas wasn't lit."
A very poor little woman, this mother of Ellen's. The hand that shook
his was so very rough, and at the neck of her stuff gown she wore a
large round onyx brooch, a piece of such ugly jewellery as is treasured
by the poor, and the sum of her tentative expressions was surely that
someone had rudely taken something from her and she was too
gentle-spirited to make complaint. She was like some brown bird that had
not migrated at the right season of the year, and had been surprised as