'I suppose,' he said to it, 'you will be the balm the child will choose to ease her sorrow—and you will bring comfort to her, as you have to thousands of others. I don't grudge them their comfort, but I do grudge you your influence. However, you won't keep it much longer. Tant mieux.'
His hand was on the garden gate—he unlatched it, and walked up to the smallest detached house he had ever beheld. He raised the diminutive knocker, and assaulted therewith the tiny brown door. Would she open it? She did not. It opened—and Litvinoff at first really thought it opened of its own accord. At anyrate it opened by some agency invisible to him. He stood and looked; but when the door slowly began to close again, he thought it was time for action. He came a step forward, and addressing nothing, said,—
'Is Mrs Litvinoff in?'
Then a very small girl in a yellow pinafore and a lilac frock showed herself from behind the door; but shyness and an incomplete knowledge of her native tongue combined to render her speechless. Litvinoff, with an impatient but perfectly gentle movement, lifted her bodily from her position as guard, and placed her outside the door.
'The air will brighten your wits, mon petit chou,' he said.
Then he walked straight into the house, and looked round the two rooms on the ground floor. Empty. He passed through the kitchen, whose proportions would have served for those of the corresponding apartment in a good-sized doll's house, and found himself in a brick-paved back yard, where there were a water-butt, a basket of wet linen, some clothes-lines, and the lady of the house. Regardless of her astonishment, he addressed himself to her.
'Oh, Mrs Litvinoff?' she answered curiously, 'she is out; she has gone to Orpington for some butter for me, sir, and she won't be long.'
'How long?'
'Perhaps an hour.'