He raised the brass knocker and tapped it twice; waited some twenty seconds, and knocked again. This time the door was opened. A maid stood before him. He glimpsed a wide hall behind her—many paintings, so many the place seemed more an art gallery.

“I wish to speak to a Mrs…. Roughwood. I believe she resides here.”

The maid was a slim young creature, wide-eyed, and without the customary lace cap. In fact, had she not worn an apron, he would not have known how to address her.

“Your name, if you please?”

He noted the absence of the “sir”; perhaps she was not a maid; her accent was far superior to a maid’s. He handed her his card.

“Pray tell her I have come a long way to see her.”

She unashamedly read the card. She was not a maid. She seemed to hesitate. But then there was a sound at the dark far end of the hall. A man some six or seven years older than Charles stood in a doorway. The girl turned gratefully to him.

“This gentleman wishes to see Sarah.”

“Yes?”

He held a pen in his hand. Charles removed his hat and spoke from the threshold.

“If you would be so good… a private matter… I knew her well before she came to London.”

There was something slightly distasteful in the man’s intent though very brief appraisal of Charles; a faintly Jewish air about him, a certain careless ostentation in the clothes; a touch of the young Disraeli. The man glanced at the girl.

“She is… ?”

“I think they talk. That is all.”

“They” were apparently her charges: the children.

“Then take him up, my dear. Sir.”

With a little bow he disappeared as abruptly as he had appeared. The girl indicated that Charles should follow her. He was left to close the door for himself. As she began to mount the stairs he had time to glance at the crowded paintings and drawings. He was sufficiently knowledgeable about modern art to recognize the school to which most of them belonged; and indeed, the celebrated, the notorious artist whose monogram was to be seen on several of them. The furore he had caused some twenty years before had now died down; what had then been seen as fit only for burning now commanded a price. The gentleman with the pen was a collector of art; of somewhat suspect art; but he was no less evidently a man of some wealth.

Charles followed the girl’s slender back up a flight of stairs; still more paintings, and still with a predominance of the suspect school. But he was by now too anxious to give them any attention. As they embarked on a second flight of stairs he ventured a question.

“Mrs. Roughwood is employed here as governess?”

The girl stopped in midstair and looked back: an amused surprise. Then her eyes fell.

“She is no longer a governess.”

Her eyes came up to his for a moment. Then she moved on her way.

They came to a second landing. His sibylline guide turned at a door.

“Kindly wait here.”

She entered the room, leaving the door ajar. From outside Charles had a glimpse of an open window, a lace curtain blowing back lightly in the summer air, a shimmer, through intervening leaves, of the river beyond. There was a low murmur of voices. He shifted his position, to see better into the room. Now he saw two men, two gentlemen. They were standing before a painting on an easel, which was set obliquely to the window, to benefit from its light. The taller of the two bent to examine some detail, thereby revealing the other who stood behind him. By chance he looked straight through the door and into Charles’s eyes. He made the faintest inclination, then glanced at someone on the hidden other side of the room.

Charles stood stunned.

For this was a face he knew; a face he had even once listened to for an hour or more, with Ernestina beside him. It was impossible, yet… and the man downstairs! Those paintings and drawings! He turned hastily away and looked, a man woken into, not out of, a nightmare, through a tall window at the rear end of the landing to a green back-garden below. He saw nothing; but only the folly of his own assumption that fallen women must continue falling—for had he not come to arrest the law of gravity? He was as shaken as a man who suddenly finds the world around him standing on its head.

A sound.

He flashed a look round. She stood there against the door she had just closed, her hand on its brass knob, in the abrupt loss of sunlight, difficult to see clearly.

And her dress! It was so different that he thought for a moment she was someone else. He had always seen her in his mind in the former clothes, a haunted face rising from a widowed darkness. But this was someone in the full uniform of the New Woman, flagrantly rejecting all formal contemporary notions of female fashion. Her skirt was of a rich dark blue and held at the waist by a crimson belt with a gilt star clasp; which also enclosed the pink-and white striped silk blouse, long-sleeved, flowing, with a delicate small collar of white lace, to which a small cameo acted as tie. The hair was bound loosely back by a red ribbon.

This electric and bohemian apparition evoked two immediate responses in Charles; one was that instead of looking two years older, she looked two years younger; and the other, that in some incomprehensible way he had not returned to England but done a round voyage back to America. For just so did many of the smart young women over there dress during the day. They saw the sense of such clothes—their simplicity and attractiveness after the wretched bustles, stays and crinolines. In the United States Charles had found the style, with its sly and paradoxically coquettish hints at emancipation in other ways, very charming; now, and under so many other new suspicions, his cheeks took a color not far removed from the dianthus pink of the stripes on her shirt.

But against this shock—what was she now, what had she become!—there rushed a surge of relief. Those eyes, that mouth, that always implicit air of defiance… it was all still there. She was the remarkable creature of his happier memories—but blossomed, realized, winged from the black pupa.

For ten long moments nothing was spoken. Then she clutched her hands nervously in front of the gilt clasp and looked down.

“How came you here, Mr. Smithson?”

She had not sent the address. She was not grateful. He did not remember that her inquiry was identical to one he had once asked her when she came on him unexpectedly; but he sensed that now their positions were strangely reversed. He was now the suppliant, she the reluctant listener.

“My solicitor was told you live here. I do not know by whom.”

“Your solicitor?”

“Did you not know I broke my engagement to Miss Freeman?”

Now she was the one who was shocked. Her eyes probed his a long moment, then looked down. She had not known. He drew a step closer and spoke in a low voice.

“I have searched every corner of this city. Every month I have advertised in the hope of…”

Now they both stared at the ground between them; at the handsome Turkey carpet that ran the length of the landing. He tried to normalize his voice.

“I see you are…” he lacked words; but he meant, altogether changed.

She said, “Life has been kind to me.”

“That gentleman in there—is he not… ?”

She nodded in answer to the name in his still incredulous eyes.

“And this house belongs to…”

She took a small breath then, so accusing had become his tone. There lurked in his mind idly heard gossip. Not of the man he had seen in the room; but of the one he had seen downstairs. Without warning Sarah moved to the stairs that went yet higher in the house. Charles stood rooted. She gave him a hesitant glance down.

“Please come.”

He followed her up the stairs, to find she had entered a room that faced north, over the large gardens below. It was an artist’s studio. On a table near the door lay a litter of drawings; on an easel a barely begun oil, the mere ground-lines, a hint of a young woman looking sadly down, foliage sketched faint behind her head; other turned canvases by the wall; by another wall, a row of hooks, from which hung a multi-colored array of female dresses, scarves, shawls; a large pottery jar; tables of impedimenta—tubes, brushes, color-pots. A bas relief, small sculptures, an urn with bulrushes. There seemed hardly a square foot without its object.