"Don't stay up too late," said Mrs. Maldon, as it were dismissing him. "A long night will do you no harm for once in a way." She smiled. "I know you'll see that everything's locked up."
"You might turn the gas down, rather low."
He tripped to the gas-bracket and put the room in obscurity. The light of the street lamp irradiated the pale green blinds of the two windows.
"Nicely, thank you! Good-night, my dear. No, I'm not ill. But you know I have these little attacks. And then bed's the best place for me." Her voice seemed to expire.
He crept across the wide carpet and departed with the skill of a trained nurse, and inaudibly closed the door.
From the landing the whole of the rest of the house seemed to offer itself to him in the night as an enigmatic and alluring field of adventure ... Should he drop the notes under the chair on the landing, where he had found them?... He could not! He could not!... He moved to the head of the stairs, past the open door of the spare bedroom, which was now dark. He stopped at the head of the stairs, and then descended. The kitchen was lighted.
He went towards the other young creature in the house. The old one lay above, in a different world remote and foreign. He and Rachel had the ground floor and all its nocturnal enchantment to themselves.
Mechanically, as he went into the kitchen, he drew his cigarette-case from his pocket. It was the proper gesture of a man in any minor crisis. He was not a frequenter of kitchens, and this visit, even more than the brief first one, seemed to him to be adventurous.
Mrs. Maldon's kitchen--or rather Rachel's--was small, warm (though the fire was nearly out), and agreeable to the eye. On the left wall was a deal dresser full of crockery, and on the right, under the low window, a narrow deal table. In front, opposite the door, gleamed the range, and on either side of the range were cupboards with oak-grained doors. There was a bright steel fender before the range, and then a hearth-rug on which stood an oak rocking-chair. The floor was a friendly chequer of red and black tiles. On the high mantelpiece were canisters and an alarm-clock and utensils; sundry other utensils hung on the walls, among the coloured images of sweet girls and Norse-like men offered by grocers and butchers under the guise of almanacs; and cupboard doors ajar dimly disclosed other utensils still, so that the kitchen had the effect of a novel, comfortable kind of workshop; which effect was helped by the clothes-drier that hung on pulley-ropes from the ceiling, next to the gas-pendant and to a stalactite of onions.