Half an hour passed. One by one the other occupants of the room walked away. The workman and the young lady were left alone together. She looked every now and then out of the window. Her note-taking did not seem to flow so smoothly as usual. Spread open on the table before her, she had a fine edition of the ‘Fugues’ of Domenico Scarlatti, which she studied a little now and then, but oftener looked out through the window. Now, from that window she had a tolerably wide prospect; and immediately beneath her eyes was the handsome old red-brick house, with its flower-beds, and its lawns, smooth, and green, and well-watered--a rural fastness in the midst of the dusty town. There was silence that was almost solemn in the big room, which was growing dusk: it was so high and airy, and so isolated; raised far above the town and its troubles; the din hushed; the rolling vehicles and the passing throng dwarfed; books on every side, and silence like a garment over all. As chimes broke that silence, and eight o’clock struck, the girl, with a sigh, turned resolutely away from the outside prospect, and applied herself again to her score. Myles, half roused by the chiming, half pleased with a particularly hard hit at the governing classes, which especially took his fancy, raised his head at this moment, and his eyes, without any thought of his neighbour. It is a gesture which every one makes sometimes in reading. Smiling with satisfaction at what struck him as a masterly argument, Myles let his eyes fall upon her. She too was looking up--not at him, but past him. Her eyes were turned towards the door, and quick as thought there passed a subtle, inexplicable flash of dislike, tempered with alarm, across her face. She made a movement as if to rise--as if to escape; then sat down again, with a flush, more of annoyance than confusion, mantling in her cheeks. Then, bending to her book, she seemed to make some effort to keep her eyes firmly fixed upon it. This little bit of by-play roused Myles’s attention. He turned his head towards the door, which was behind him, and he saw how it was opened, and a man came into the room. A gentleman? he speculated, as he first saw the figure, in the obscure background. The visitor gradually approached, and Myles, staring unceremoniously at him, experienced a feeling of surprise, disgust, and sudden enlightenment as to the cause of the young lady’s disturbance.