Then she busily lighted the little hall-lamp with his matches, and hurried down, taking the matches, to the kitchen. After a few moments George followed her; he was obliged to follow her. She had removed her coat; it lay on the sole chair. The hat and blouse which she wore seemed very vivid in the kitchen--vestiges of past glorious episodes in concert-halls and hansoms. She had lighted the kitchen-lamp and was standing apparently idle. The alarum-clock on the black mantelpiece ticked noisily. The cat sat indifferently on the corner of the clean, bare table. George hesitated in the doorway. He was extremely excited, because the tremendous fact of what he had done and what she had permitted, with all the implications, had to be explicitly acknowledged between them. Of course it had to be acknowledged! They were both fully aware of the thing, she as well as he, but spoken words must authenticate its existence as only spoken words could. She said, beginning sternly and finishing with a peculiar smile: "I do think this business of father and Mrs. Lobley is going rather far." And George had a sudden new sense of the purely feminine adroitness of women. In those words she had clearly conceded that their relations were utterly changed. Never before had she made even the slightest, most distant reference to the monstrous household actuality, unadmitted and yet patent, of the wooing of Mrs. Lobley the charwoman by her father, the widower of her mother. If Mr. Haim stayed away from home of an evening, Mrs. Lobley was the siren who deflected him from the straight domestic path. She knew it; George surmised it; the whole street had its suspicions. But hitherto Marguerite had given no sign. She now created George the confidant of her resentment. And her smile was not an earnest of some indulgence for her father--her smile was for George alone.