The girl’s hands seemed to him to be shaking too, as she thrust in the last hairpins and pressed her two palms against the sides of her small head.

“Come,” she said, “I’ll put out the lamp now, and we’ll go back to the sitting-room.”

When they were back by the fire, they both instinctively drew their chairs close up to the bars and held out their arms towards the warmth. Long-drawn shivers kept running through Wolf’s body, as if he had been drenched in floods of ice-cold rain; and he felt certain that the slender form by his side was experiencing an identical sensation.

At the moment of seating herself there⁠—it was in a chair this time, and not upon her four-legged stool⁠—she had given Wolf a look that filled him with self-reproach. “I have hurt her feelings,” he said to himself, “in the one unpardonable way.”

Listlessly taking up the silver-knobbed poker from the side of the fender, he broke a great smouldering lump of coal into blazing flame.