The next evening, going down to the drawing-room at the appointed time, Miriam found it empty and lit only by the reflection from the street. Standing in the dim blue light she knew so well, she passed through a moment of wondering whether she had ever really sat talking in this room with Mr. Shatov. It seemed so long ago. His mere presence there had been strange enough; youth and knowledge and prosperity where for so long there had been nothing but the occasional presence of people who were in mysterious disgraceful difficulties, and no speech but the so quickly acrimonious interchange of those who are trying to carry things off. Perhaps he was only late. She lit the gas and leaving the door wide sat down to the piano. The loose flatly vibrating shallow tones restored her conviction that once more the house was as before, its usual intermittent set of boarders, coming punctually to meals, enduring each other downstairs in the warmth until bedtime, disappearing one by one up the unlighted stairs, having tea up here on Sundays, and for her, the freedom of the great dark house, the daily oblivion of moving about in it, the approach up the quiet endlessly dreaming old grey street in the afternoon, late at night, under all the changes of season and of weather; the empty drawing-room that was hers every Sunday morning with its piano, and always there at night within its open door, inviting her into its blue-lit stillness; her room upstairs, alive now and again under some chance spell of the weather, or some book which made her feel that any life in London would be endurable for ever that secured her room with its evening solitude, now and again the sense of strange fresh invisibly founded beginnings; often a cell of torturing mocking memories and apprehensions, driving her down into the house to hear the dreadful voices, giving out in unchanged accents, their unchanging words and phrases.