On an autumn afternoon of 1919 a hatless man with a slight limp might have been observed ascending the gentle, broad acclivity of Riceyman Steps, which lead from King’s Cross Road up to Riceyman Squar...

On an autumn afternoon of 1919 a hatless man with a slight limp might have been observed ascending the gentle, broad acclivity of Riceyman Steps, which lead from King’s Cross Road up to Riceyman Squar...

The shop had one window in King’s Cross Road, but the entrance, with another window, was in Riceyman Steps. The King’s Cross Road window held only cheap editions, in their paper jackets, of popular mo...

At the back of the rather spacious and sombre shop (which by reason of the bays of bookshelves seemed larger than it really was) came a small room, with a doorway, but no door, into the shop. This was...

“Now, now, Elsie, my girl. What’s this? What is it?” Mr. Earlforward spoke benevolently but, for him, rather quickly and abruptly. And Elsie was intimidated. She worked for Mr. Earlforward only in the...

Mrs. Arb was listening to a customer and giving change. “ ‘And when you’ve got children of your own,’ she said, ‘and when you’ve got children of your own,’ that was her remark,” the customer, an insec...

You would have thought, while Mrs. Arb was talking to Mr. Earlforward, that the enigma of the universe could not exist in her presence. Yet as soon as she was alone it was there, pervading the closed ...

The entrance-gates to the yard of Daphut, the builder and stonemason, which lay between Mrs. Arb’s shop and the steps proper, were set back a little from the general frontage of the north side of Rice...

The two women were working together in a living room over the shop. An oil-lamp had been hung on a hook which would have held a curtain loop had there been any curtains. The lamp, tilted slightly forw...

“She never came to you this morning?” questioned Mr. Earlforward with eager and cheerful interest. “No. Did she to you?” Mr. Earlforward shook his head, smiling. “You seem to be quite the philosopher ...

St. Andrew’s Church, of yellow bricks with freestone dressings, a blue slate roof, and a red coping, was designed and erected in the brilliant reign of William IV, whose Government, under Lord Grey, h...

The house which Mrs. Arb decided to enter had a full, but not an extraordinary, share of experience of human life. There were three floors of it. On the ground floor lived a meat-salesman, his wife an...

The front door was opened to Mrs. Arb’s quiet knock by the oldest child in the house, an obstreperous boy of five, who was suddenly struck sheepish and mute by the impressive lady on the doorstep. He ...

“I think I’ve put her straight,” said Mrs. Arb very cheerfully to Mr. Earlforward, out in the Square, and gave him an account of the interview. Mr. Earlforward’s mind was much relieved. He admired Mrs...

One morning in November, at a little past eight o’clock, Mrs. Arb, watching from behind the door of her yet unopened shop, saw Mr. Earlforward help Elsie to carry out the empty bookstand and set it do...

Cytherea reigned in Mr. Earlforward’s office behind the shop⁠—invisible, but she was there⁠—probably reclining⁠—ask not how!⁠—on the full red lips (which fascinated Mrs. Arb) of Mr. Earlforward. It wa...

Cytherea reigned in Mr. Earlforward’s office behind the shop⁠—invisible, but she was there⁠—probably reclining⁠—ask not how!⁠—on the full red lips (which fascinated Mrs. Arb) of Mr. Earlforward. It wa...

Elsie’s bedroom was a servant’s bedroom, and always had been, though not used as such for many years. Its furniture comprised one narrow iron bedstead, one small yellow washstand, one small yellow che...

As Henry and Violet approached the turnstile, Henry murmured to Violet: “How much is it? How much is it?” “One and three, including tax,” Violet murmured in reply. Half a crown for the two was less th...

For potent municipal or administrative reasons the tramcar carrying Henry and his bride would not stop at Riceyman Steps, but it stopped fifty yards farther down the road. As Henry was whisked thunder...

While Henry was inquiring into the market value of the dirt which he himself had amassed, the new Mrs. Earlforward went upstairs to inspect her best bedroom. It was empty, but electric current was bur...

The next morning, before the first church-bells had begun to ring for early communion, and before the sun had decided whether or not it would shine upon Riceyman Square and Steps that day, Violet very...

Elsie it always was who every morning breathed the breath of life into the dead nocturnal house, and revived it, and turned it once again from a dark, unresponsive, meaningless and deathlike keep into...

Elsie it always was who every morning breathed the breath of life into the dead nocturnal house, and revived it, and turned it once again from a dark, unresponsive, meaningless and deathlike keep into...

By chance Violet went down into the shop just after the first-post delivery and just before Henry came. She was always later in the shop on Monday mornings than on other mornings because on that day s...

Violet was attending to another customer when Mr. Bauersch came into the shop. She ignored him until she had sped the first customer, who happened also to be “in the trade.” According to Violet’s code...

When Henry came home, limping, taciturn and absorbed, in the afternoon, Violet examined him carefully with her glance, and, asking no questions, gave him the written list of the day’s transactions, wh...

Tea was late; it was indeed very late⁠—for tea. But Mr. Earlforward, down in the office, gave no sign of hunger, or even of impatience. He had to be called to the meal, and he responded without any al...

Violet laughed in the dark: an unusual laugh, not vivacious nor hearty, but a laugh. “I’m glad, Elsie,” she said, withdrawing her hand as though Elsie’s cap had been red-hot. Elsie, dismissed, felt re...

Elsie was cleaning the upper windows of T. T. Riceyman’s, and she had arrived at the second-floor spare-room, which had two windows, one on King’s Cross Road and the other on Riceyman Steps. (A third ...

Elsie was cleaning the upper windows of T. T. Riceyman’s, and she had arrived at the second-floor spare-room, which had two windows, one on King’s Cross Road and the other on Riceyman Steps. (A third ...

There was only one exit from the T. T. Riceyman premises⁠—through the shop. Once a door had given direct access to King’s Cross Road, but so long ago that the new bricks which had bricked it up were n...

A dramatic event occurred that same afternoon at the shop. Violet and Henry were together in the office, where the electricity had just been turned on; the shop itself was still depending on nature fo...

“What do you think of Mr. Earlforward’s health?” Violet demanded peremptorily, in the bedroom. Her features were alive with urgent emotion. She almost intimidated the doctor. “Ha!” he retorted defensi...

Elsie, straight from the street, sat down on the edge of her creaking bed on the second-floor and looked at her best boots, which had lost their polish during the course of the afternoon and were cove...

When Violet awoke the next morning at the appointed time for waking, and heard the familiar muffled sounds of Elsie’s activity, she was tempted to stay in bed; she had not had a good night, and she fe...

“Here,” said Mrs. Earlforward frigidly to Elsie, handing her two coins. “Slip out now and buy half a pound of bacon and the same quantity as before of that cheese. And please hurry back so as you can ...

During the day Henry had asked several times for bulletins as to Elsie’s consumption of food, and he received them with satisfaction, but also with a certain sardonic air new in Violet’s experience of...

“How do you feel, my girl?” Henry asked. They lay again in bed together. Before leaving the doctor had given, with casualness, certain instructions, not apparently important, which Violet had carried ...

In the morning Dr. Raste, unusually interested in the psychological aspect of the Earlforward affair, arrived at about ten o’clock in a taxicab, prepared and well-braced to make good his word to Viole...

Elsie was forgetting to fasten the shop door. With a little start at her own negligence she secured both the bolt and the lock. She thought suddenly of the days⁠—only a year away, yet far, far off in ...

Elsie was forgetting to fasten the shop door. With a little start at her own negligence she secured both the bolt and the lock. She thought suddenly of the days⁠—only a year away, yet far, far off in ...

In the early dusk of the afternoon, about four o’clock, there was a banging on the shop-door, and the short bark of a dog, who evidently considered himself entitled to help in whatever affair was afoo...

“I’m raging in my heart! I’m raging in my heart!” Elsie said to herself. “It makes me gnash my teeth!” And she did gnash her teeth all alone in the steadily darkening shop. “I’m that ashamed!” she sai...

Mrs. Perkins’s boy, who lived with Mrs. Perkins in the house next door to Elsie’s old home in Riceyman Square, and who had a chivalric regard for Elsie, fortunately happened to be out in the Square. I...

Towards four o’clock in the morning Joe woke up from a short sleep and suddenly put questions to Elsie about his safety in that strange house, and also he inquired whose bed he was in. “You’re in my b...

She was running up the Steps (not as early as she hoped, owing to a quick succession of requisitions from her two patients at the last moment) to find a messenger in the Square to dispatch for the doc...

“I suppose I must just do the best I can, sir,” said Elsie on the landing outside the bedroom. She smiled timidly, cheerfully and benevolently. The doctor looked at her, startled. It seemed to him tha...

Mr. Earlforward woke up after what seemed to him a very long sleep, feeling appreciably better. He had less pain; at moments he had no pain. And his mind, he thought, was surprisingly clear and vigoro...

That night Elsie sat in the parlour (as she still to herself called the dining room) by the gas-fire which she had lighted on her own responsibility. An act and a situation which a few days earlier, t...

Not a sound in the house; nor outside the house. Not a clock nor a watch going in the house. Mr. Earlforward had listened interminably to get the time from the church, but without success. He knew onl...

“Joe,” inquired Elsie, “where’s your papers?” She had brought his clothes⁠—dry, folded, and possibly wearable⁠—back into her bedroom. She had found nothing in the pockets of the suit except some cigar...

Mr. and Mrs. Belrose occupied a small bedroom at the top of their house. As for her sister and his sister, they fitted their amplitudes into some vague “somewhere else,” and those of the curious who i...

The transience of things human was wonderfully illustrated in the next fortnight. A short and drab account of the nocturnal discoveries of Mr. Belrose at T. T.’s appeared in one morning paper, and wit...