Fate, which so seldom interferes with kindly intention in the lives of men, had cut what had become a strangling knot, and Kitty, from a dreadful, never-forgotten burden, had become a rather touching, piteous memory, growing ever dimmer as first the months, and then the years, slipped by.
Even so, her ghost sufficiently often haunted this large room, and the other apartments which composed Sherston's set of chambers, to make him determine that Miss Pomeroy should never come there. And she, being in this as unlike other, commonplace, young woman as she was in everything else, had never put him to the pain of finding an insincere excuse for his unwillingness to show her the place in which he lived and worked….
The coming night stretched long and bleak before to-morrow's bridegroom. There were fourteen hours to live through before he could even see Helen, for the time of the marriage had been fixed for eleven o'clock.
Sherston was not looking forward to the actual ceremony—no man ever does; and though it was to be a war wedding, a great many people, as he was ruefully aware, had been bidden to the ceremony. But it was comfortable to know that none of the guests had been asked to go back to the house from which he and his bride were to start for Sussex at one o'clock, in the motor which was Mrs. Pomeroy's marriage gift to her daughter.
Suddenly Sherston discovered the he was very hungry! He had lunched at Cadogan Square at a quarter to two, but he had felt too inwardly excited in that queer atmosphere of tears and laughter, of trousseau and wedding presents, to eat.
Even the least earthly of Romantics cannot forget for long the claims of the flesh, and so, smiling a little wryly in the darkness, he now told himself that the best thing he could do was to go out and get some supper. Acquainted with all the eating houses in the region, he was glad indeed that after to-night he would never have to enter one again.
Pulling down the green blind in front of him, Sherston walked across the room and pulled down the blind of the other window, for the London lighting orders had become much stricter of late. Then he turned on the electric light switch, took up his hat and stick, and went out into the little lobby.
Before him was a narrow aperture which opened straight on to the steep, short flight of steps connecting his chambers with the stone staircase of the big old house. This latter-like set of steps had a door top and bottom, but the lower door, which gave on to the landing, was generally left open. Turning out the light in the lobby, Sherston put his left hand on the banister and slid down in the darkness, taking the dozen steps as it were in one stride.
As he reached the bottom he suddenly became aware that the door before him, that giving on the landing, was shut, and that some one, almost certainly a child—for there was not room on the mat for a full-grown person—was crouching down just within the door.
Sherston felt sharply, perhaps unreasonably, irritated. Known in the neighborhood as open-handed and kindly, it had sometimes happened, but generally only in wintry weather, that he had come home to find some poor waif lying in wait for him. Man, woman or child who had wandered in, maybe, before the big door downstairs was closed, or who, if still blessed with some outer semblance of gentility, had managed cunningly to get past the Cerberus who lived in the basement, and whose duty it was to open the front door, after eight at night, to non-residents.