"Come along!" he urged.
She followed him obediently across the dangerous road. He waited for her at the opposite kerb, and then they went up Ship Street. He turned into the entrance of the Chichester, which was grandiose, with a flight of shallow steps, and then a porch with two basket chairs, and then another flight of shallow steps ending in double doors which were noticeably higher than the street level. She still followed.
"Nobody in here, I expect," said George Cannon, indicating a door on the right, to an old waiter who stood in the dark hall.
"No, sir."
George Cannon opened the door as a master, ushered Hilda into a tiny room furnished with a desk and two chairs, and shut the door.
III
The small window was of ground glass and gave no prospect of the outer world, from which it seemed to Hilda that she was as completely cut off as in a prison. She was alone with George Cannon, and beyond the narrow walls which caged them together, and close together, there was nothing! All Brighton, save this room, had ceased to exist. Hilda was now more than ever affrighted, shamed, perturbed, agonised. Yet at the same time she had the desperate calm of the captain of a ship about to founder with all hands. And she saw glimpses, beautiful and compensatory, of the romantic quality of common life. She was in a little office of a perfectly ordinary boarding-house--(she could even detect the stale odours of cooking)--with a realistic man of business, and they were about to discuss a perfectly ordinary piece of scandal; and surely they might be called two common-sense people! And withal, the ordinariness and the midland gumption of the scene were shot through with the bright exotic rays of romance! She thought: "It is painful and humiliating to be caught and fixed as I am. But it is wonderful too!"
"The fact is," said George Cannon, in an easy reassuring tone, "we never get the chance of a bit of quiet chat. Upon my soul we don't! Now I suppose it's Sarah who's been worrying you?"
"Yes."
"What did she say?... You'd better sit down, don't you think?" He swung round the pivoted arm-chair in front of the closed desk and pointed her to it.