Up-stairs in her bedroom, she opened her window and looked out at the faint drizzle of rain which was just enough to mellow the leafy autumnal scents and diffuse the golden beams of the lamps along the Heath. There was the sound of another window's being opened on a line with hers; presently a head and shoulders scarcely definable in the darkness leaned out, whistling an old French air that was familiar to her from earliest childhood, the words of which had long ago been forgotten. She could not help whistling the air in unison; and after a moment's silence a voice from the head and shoulders asked who it was. "A girl," Sylvia said. "Anybody could tell that," the voice commented, a little scornfully. "Because the noise is all woolly." "It's not," Sylvia contradicted, indignantly. "Perhaps you'll say I'm out of tune? I know quite well who you are. You're Arthur Madden, the boy next door." "But who are you?" "I'm Sylvia Scarlett." "Are you a niece of Mrs. Gustard?" the voice inquired. "Of course not," Sylvia scoffed. "I'm just staying here." "Who with?" "By myself." "By yourself?" the voice echoed, incredulously. "Why not? I'm nearly sixteen." This was too much for Arthur Madden, who struck a match to illuminate the features of the strange unknown. Although he did not succeed in discerning Sylvia, he lit up his own face, which she liked well enough to suggest they should go for a walk, making the proposal a kind of test for herself of Arthur Madden's character, and deciding that if he showed the least hesitation in accepting she would never speak to him again. The boy, however, was immediately willing; the two pairs of shoulders vanished; Sylvia put on her coat and went down-stairs. "Going out for a blow?" Mr. Gustard asked. Sylvia nodded. "With the boy next door," she answered. "You haven't been long," said Mr. Gustard, approvingly. "That's the way I like to see it. When I courted Mrs. Gustard, which was forty years ago come next November, it was in the time of toolip-planting, and I hove a toolip bulb at her and caught her in the chignon. 'Whatever are you doing of?' she says to me. 'It's a proposal of marriage,' I says, and when she started giggling I was that pleased I planted half the toolips upside down. But that's forty years ago, that is. Mrs. Gustard's grown more particular since, and so as she's washing up the tea-things in the scullery, I should just slip out, and I'll tell her you've gone out to get a paper to see if it's true what somebody said about Buckingham Palace being burned to a cinder." Sylvia was not at all sure that she ought to recognize Mrs. Gustard's opinion even so far as by slipping out and thereby giving her an idea that she did not possess perfect liberty of action. However, she decided that the point was too trifling to worry about, and, with a wave of her hand, she left her landlord to tell what story he chose to his wife.