At a tremendous pace they jingled along a narrow street of shops and châlets. The street presently opened to a circle about the little church and narrowed again and ended, showing beyond, as the sleigh pulled up at the steps of a portico, rising ground and the beginning of pinewoods. CHAPTER II She followed the little servant, who had darted forth to seize her baggage, into a small lounge whose baking warmth recalled the worst of the train journey; seeming—though, since still one breathed, air was there—like an over-heated vacuum. The brisk little maid, untroubled, was already at the top of a short flight of wide red-carpeted stairs, and making impatient rallying sounds—like one recalling a straying dog. Miriam went gladly to the promise of the upper air. But in going upwards there was no relief. Glancing, as she passed at the turn of the stairs a figure standing in a darkness made by the twilight in the angle of the wall, she found the proprietress receiving her; a thick rigid figure in a clumsy black dress, silent, and with deep-set glinting eyes hostile and suspicious stirring a memory of other eyes gazing out like this upon the world, of peasant women at cottage doors in German villages, peering out with evil eyes, but from worn and kindly faces. There was nothing kindly about this woman, and her commonness was almost startling, dreary and meagre and seeming to be of the spirit. She blamed for the unmitigated impression the fatigue she was silently pleading whilst she searched for the mislaid German phrases in which to explain that she had chosen the cheaper room. She found only the woman’s name: Knigge. This was Frau Knigge, at once seeming more human, and obviously waiting for her to speak. Suddenly, and still unbending from her rigid pose, she made statements in slow rasping English and a flat voice, that came unwillingly and told of vanished interest in life. Life, as she spoke, looked terrible that could make a being so crafty and so cold, that could show to anyone on earth as it showed to this woman. Admitting her identity, seeing herself as she was being seen, Miriam begged for her room, hurrying through her words to hide the thoughts that still they seemed to reveal, and that were changing, as she heard the sound of her own voice, dreadfully, not to consideration for one whose lot had perhaps been too hard to bear, but to a sudden resentment of parleying, in her character as Roman citizen, with this peasant whose remoteness of being was so embarrassing her.