First down another and a longer stone passage, the doors leading from either side of which were wide open, showing bathrooms, kitchens, and other domestic penetralia; then up a flight of stairs to a landing covered with cocoa-nut matting, and giving on to a long corridor, on the stone-coloured wall of which was painted in large black letters, "Corridor No. 4." Closed doors here--doors of dormitories, where the inmates were shut in for the night: some tossing on their dream-haunted pillows; some haply--God knows--enjoying a mental rest as soft and sweet as the slumber which enchained them, borne away to the bygone days, when they thought and felt and knew, ere the brain was distraught, and the memory snapped, and the mind either warped or void. All was perfectly quiet as George passed along, stopping at length before a door which was closed but not locked, and at which he tapped lightly. Lightly, but with a sound which was quickly heard, for a soft voice cried immediately "_Entrez!_" and he opened the door, and went in. It was a pretty little room, considerably too lofty for its breadth--a long narrow slip of a place, which some people with pleasant development of mortuary tendencies might have rendered unpleasantly like a grave. But it was tricked out with a pretty wall-paper, all rosebuds and green leaves; some good photographs of foreign scenery were framed on the walls; a wooden Swiss peasant with a clock-face let into the centre of his waistcoat, and its works ticking and running and whirring away in the centre of his anatomy, stood on the mantelpiece; the fireplace was filled up with bright-gilded shavings; and the bed, instead of being the mere ordinary iron stump bedstead to be found in other dormitories of the house, was gay with white hangings, and blue bows tastefully disposed here and there. On it lay a woman, who had risen on her elbow at George's knock, and who remained in the same attitude, awaiting his approach. A woman of small stature evidently, and delicately made, with small well-cut features and small bones. Her hair, as snow-white as the cap under which it was looped up, contrasted oddly with the deep ruddy bronze of her complexion; such bronze as, travelling south, you first begin to notice among the Lyonnaises, and afterwards find so common along the shores of the Mediterranean. But Time, though he had changed the colour of her locks--and to be so very white now, they must necessarily have been raven black before--had failed in dimming the lustre of her marvellous eyes; they remained large, and dark, and appealing, as they must have been in earliest youth. Full of liquid love and kindliness were they too, as they beamed a welcome to George, a welcome seconded by her outstretched hand, which rested on his head as he bent down beside her. "You are late, George," she said, with the faintest foreign accent; "but I had not given you up."