But when the days grew longer and warmer the dining room was too hot for comfort; the study, even when the doctor was out, was always kept locked, and Pavlo's own bedroom on the third floor was even hotter than the dining room. So he would end by taking his books or his chalks into the hall, where at least there was a little coolness to be had from the chink under the front door. There he would sit on the stairs, or lie flat on the floor, kicking up his heels as he read or painted, till he knew every stringy part of the long strip of gray, red-edged carpet that crossed the middle of the passage, and every place where the paint, which had peeled off the once-painted floor, had left curiously shaped patches, which only needed the touch of a pencil here and there to turn into all sorts of faces. The yellow walls, imitating veined marble, offered terrible temptation of the same kind, but it was too dangerous; pencil marks on the walls would have been seen at once. There was one spot, indeed, where the criss-cross of veins made such an exact head of Hermes,[6] winged cap and all, with only the back of the head and one ear missing, that Pavlo absolutely could not resist touching it up, one long hot afternoon. He rubbed all the pencil marks very carefully off afterwards, with his piece of india rubber, but this had got so mixed up in his pocket with odds and ends of chalk and with half a "loucoumi" that the rubbing-away marks were very red and sticky and showed worse than the pencil ones. So Pavlo had been rather frightened, till he discovered that by pushing the hat stand a little nearer the study door, the place was quite hidden. However, he dared not make any more attempts on the wall, and the afternoon dragged wearily.