An opera and Lady Grasmere
Author: Unknown
Date: 2017-05-30T05:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction
Description: Book digitized by Google
Rights: Public Domain

TABLE of CONTENTS

BOOK I—BEFORE THE GATES

CHAPTER I—THE INSTRUMENT.

CHAPTER II—MERCERON ROUSING

CHAPTER III—MERCERON DANCES

CHAPTER IV—MERCERON IS WIDE AWAKE.

CHAPTER V—FIVE A.M. AND ?ISABELLA.?

CHAPTER VI—?ISABELLA.?

CHAPTER VII—MERCERON GOES TO BED.

CHAPTER VIII—AN EARL?S CORONET, A YELLOW DOMINO, AND KNIGHTSBRIDGE.

CHAPTER IX—SNOB TO THE RESCUE.

CHAPTER X—THE GATES OPEN.

CHAPTER XI—THEY OPEN WIDER.

CHAPTER XII—ARRIVED.

BOOK II—WITHIN

CHAPTER I—TRANSITION

CHAPTER II—POSTMEN.

CHAPTER III—LIFE, AND DEATH.

CHAPTER IV—A LITTLE MUSIC.

CHAPTER V—A LITTLE MORE MUSIC.

CHAPTER VI—STILL MORE MUSIC.

CHAPTER VII—THE VICTIMS.

CHAPTER VIII—GHOSTS.

CHAPTER IX—ERRORS AND COMEDY.

CHAPTER X—ERRORS AND CORRECTIONS.

TO-DAY.

LIST of ILLUSTRATIONS

- SHE PASSED A HAND UNDER His ARM .

- “HOPE IT’LL TURN FINE AGAIN!”

- “YOU REALLY DID SPLENDIDLY”, SHE SAID.

- HER UPTURNED FACE BUT JUST BELOW HIS OWN

BOOK I.
BEFORE THE GATES

CHAPTER I
THE INSTRUMENT.

HUTCHINSON does not know. Not only is he blandly ignorant of the deeps from which he extracted Merceron, but his own flagrant part in all that was to follow upon this eventful routing out, his consequent claim to public monuments, is equally undreamed of by this darkened Hutchinson. He is, indeed, aware of the conditions and circumstances under which Merceron and the Countess of Grasmere first became acquainted—nobody more so, in fact,—but, speaking broadly and with a disregard of irrelevant detail, Hutchinson does not know.

And yet it is to Hutchinson even more than to Harvey Merceron’s self that we owe that one masterpiece—the precursor, let us hope, of many—which has redeemed our operatic composers, British music in general, from the charge of insignificance. Before the advent of Hutchinson, British music was, relatively speaking, a negligible quantity. But now, Hutchinson has passed, and the ears of the civilised world strain hopefully towards London. And through it all, heedless and entirely deaf to an art which he may rightly be said to have created, Hutchinson, unconscious of his one great mission,—Hutchinson, a being doomed to perpetual darkness, treads lightly on a Mediterranean quarter-deck, and flirts indifferently well with the women of various stations.

Yet, perhaps, to this hero’s maiden aunt, Miss Bray, are we even more indebted than to her favourite nephew; for she it was who presented Hutchinson with the two stalls that inspired his movements. But the claims of Miss Bray are infinitesimal, unworthy of further consideration. For without Hutchinson, Merceron had never issued forth into that July evening, Lady Grasmere had gone a different road, nor had Isabella known the ways of Providence. Without Hutchinson, Merceron would have lain idle at the bottom of his largest wicker-chair, and that night would have run to waste, fruitless as many a night preceding.

Hutchinson had lunched with Miss Bray, and had then been turned loose upon a sweltering town with those two flimsy stalls deep in his breast-pocket. Covent Garden was hardly in his line; “and yet it would be a pity to waste them,” he reflected. At this point he bethought himself of Mercero . Merceron was musical; he had not seen him for years, and as boys they had been 'nseparable. He would go and look up Merceron; Merceron would enjoy Covent Garden and tell him what it was all about. So Hutchinson drifted from Kensi lgton to Piccadilly, thence to the chambers in Down Street where Merceron had settled after taking his degree at Oxford.

It was like dragging a mole into broad daylight, this starting of Merceron, as Hutchinson —hearty as a south-west gale—roused him, made him shave, bullied him into his evening-clothes, and finally drove him forth into the open, where his locks were shorn and arranged at a convenient barber’s, Hutchinson directing. As they walked, the sailor unfolded the details of their subsequent programme. It hardly coincided with the popular conception of a first move towards a Renaissance.

Merceron’s mole-like tendencies had ceased with the donning of his swallow-tails, this utter re-construction of his exterior. True, he blinked as they strolled off to Hutchinson’s hotel in Jermyn Street; but there was no inclination to burrow. Merceron’s blinking was a pleasurable movement of unaccustomed eyelids.

They dined expensively at the newest thing in restaurants and drank champagne, Hutchinson leading. The sailor’s visits to the metropolis were akin to those of the angels; and when he came, he did things in style, and thought them over when aboard his ship. And Hutchinson invariably contrived that these thoughts should be pleasant ones. Opportunity denied him the luxury of enjoyments that stale from habit or constant repetition, and, to Hutchinson, London was always new though never varying.

To Merceron fate was even kinder. London was brand-new, and their dinner an initiation. The string-band that discoursed behind a bank of flowers from the gallery at the restaurant’s further end was as something celestial by mere virtue of its exalted position. The waiters in black and gold with silk stockings were Gany-medes, and the swiftly-served courses nectar and ambrosia. To Hutchinson, unafflicted as he was with a classical training, the service was but a luxury, while Merceron deemed it one of the Arts. Mirrors and gilding surrounded them, and Merceron spoke feelingly of the “white satin wall-paper.”

Yet these were but material aids. Crowning all, lending her mystery and subtle charm to this opening foray, still further ravishing his unused senses, was Woman. The capital W is Mercercm's. White hands toyed with the dainty menu-cards, gems flashing on the supple fingers; silken hair curled, jewelled,and aigretted over ivory brows, framing the face in radiant gold, or dark, nocturnal, paling it with a more spiritual glory; diamonds stirred limpid on snowy necks, the round arms shimmered, catching light and colour from the clustered glow-lamps and shaded candles; and there were bright eyes, joyous, eloquent, subduing, bright eyes that lingered on Merceron’s. And Merceron, who had eaten chops in a colourless club these many months, swayed in his seat and deemed that life, though earnest and leading to the grave, had indeed its hours of relaxation.

Merceron was leaving his rut—was approaching the high road. He began to contemplate their after-dinner movements with some degree of satisfaction. The thought of the opera no longer left him unmoved; it was a goal, an inevitable sequel to his present beatitude. He even took the trouble to discover what was being played, and the names of the singers. They were giving Faust—and Faust had its moments! Harvey, who knew every note of the score, commenced to hum.

Hutchinson, meanwhile, was reminiscent, and told stories anent a life on the ocean wave.

Some of these were rude. Merceron was surprised; he had forgotten the existence of such adventure. His own life had been far too engrossing to permit of such incidents as these.

So consistently had he passed such action by, that it had altogether ceased to exist. But then he had passed everything by, and to-night—well, there was something in this busy outdoor life after all!

The string-band played a waltz of Strauss, and Merceron recalled dances, and the tent they had put up in his college quad in “Coramem.” week, and the races. He had evidently once been as they, as these people—it was strange! and he turned on the throng of diners, the men and the women; and the women’s exceeding beauty made him wonder whether it were ever possible to go back, to return to the days when he lived their life and they were part of his?

“How old do I look, Hutchie?” he asked, across the table.

“Twenty-one this morning,” came jestingly from the other side.

“No larking!” protested Merceron, very much in earnest.

“Young—deuced young! I don’t want to offend you; you should grow a moustache.”

“I'm twenty-five.”

“I know; but really, you don’t look it,” protested Hutchinson—“comes of living quiet, I suppose.”

“Hope so!”

They went out on to the balcony and lit cigars and sipped their coffee. Below ran the river, and London was rich with the gold of evening. A faint orange tinged the Western sky, and ahead over the water the moon was turning from down to metal. A steamboat glided to a pier below and cabs hurried along the Embankment. A raucous boy shouted the evening papers, and through green foliage they could see the statue of Robert Raikes gazing placid over beds of flowers towards Cleopatra’s needle. A man on a seat was eating the contents of a greasy newspaper.

“Who will ever put this to music!” said Merceron.

“Eh!” from Hutchinson.

The river glided, a strip of burnished metal rolling East. Warehouse and factory, wharf and pointed chimney, brooded dark and silent over the further bank. The bridges were live with ceaseless traffic, and dotted with pressing humanity.

“My God, what melody!” said Merceron.

“Eh!” said Hutchinson.

“If these Cockneys only knew what they were singing!—give me another match.”

“Doesn’t it draw?” asked Hutchinson.

“The weed’s all right—it’s these people,” and Merceron indicated the diners sitting behind the tall windows and the hastening folk below.

“‘ Youth on the prow and pleasure at the helm! ’” spouted Hutchinson. The quotation was nautical and it had stuck.

“Etty’s picture is crude literalism — why didn’t he dine here!”

“What do you mean? Harvey, old boy, you’re raving; that’s because I haven’t been to see you of late!”

“Wish you had,” said Merceron. “This is good!” and he thought of Isabella, smiled over Sopwith, leaning back in his chair and letting the smoke run through his nostrils. “This is good!” he repeated.

“Trust me for knowing what’s what!” said Hutchinson. “When we put in at Spezzia— by Jove, those Italians did do us well! . . .”

And then Hutchinson again took the helm, and narrated the secret history of a visit of the British Mediterranean Squadron to a Latin port. And Merceron listened eagerly, for there was Life in the yarn.

It was nearer nine than eight when they arose and walked across—through the Strand, past the Lyceum, and into the Opera House.

And in the Opera House there was more Life.

CHAPTER II
MERCERON ROUSING

HUTCIIINSON did not know, was blind to Merceron’s elation as the latter sat swelling in his seat—from the time of their arrival, when Valentine occupied the centre of the stage, down to the fall of the curtain. They had gone out between the acts, upstairs to the foyer and on to the verandah; and even here Merceron’s ardour was unabated, had increased rather than slackened. He had exchanged whiskies and cigarettes with perfect strangers, become the centre of a group of promiscuous swallow - tails. Merceron was glowing. He radiated a warmth, a subtle magnetism that attracted passers by, and made pretty women wonder why he had never taken them down to dinner.

He had called the opera “fine,” accompanied by varying adverbs, no less than six times— twice to each entr'acte — and he had drawn Hutchinson’s attention with an equal frequency to the girl in front of them, a refreshingly youthful girl dressed in white, evidently in her first season, and possessed of the loveliest of complexions and tip-tilted noses.

But outer and external symbols of elation were all these, the merest trifles; inside, the commotion was volcanic. The music was much, the music and the singing had their place in Merceron’s intoxication; but the house, with its triple row of radiant boxes, its low-lying parterre of jewelled colour that swept from the orchestra to these festive tiers—the house was more. To-night was the farewell appearance of a supreme soprano, and all London had come in to assist at this leave-taking. Her Marguerite was indeed divine, yet to our newly liberated friend, little more than an accompaniment, and, again, a pretext for the coming together of all those dazzling people, who beamed down on the stage, like flowers out of a window-box, or shone, row on row, about and before him.

“And to think that I should have lived among all this and never have known!” said Merceron as his two eyes roamed. He lay back in his stall and the performance hadvanished. Hewas thinking his own thoughts with the music as aid and furtherer, hastening and heightening his emotions.

At the end of each act he applauded mechanically, and then drew Hutchinson away for a stroll. Impressions followed each other so rapidly as to be a fever.

Greetings, snatches of conversation, tiny bursts of laughter came to him, kaleidoscopic, Wagnerian, sustained. Every box opening on these public corridors swelled the movement. All London, from Royalty downward to the newest millionaire, had become orchestral.

He would have liked to participate, to lose himself in this universal melody, to be one of this celestial crowd; but he was without beginning, without halting point, a being tossing idly, impotent, and anchorless over that blissful sea, possessing all, yet possessed of nothing,— desiring all, yet too hurried for any premeditated attack.

The suddenness of the incursion had destroyed his reflective powers, and he could only gaze with eyes busily working, his handsome face alight with the concentrated movement of the entire throng.

On to the verandah they went, past the foyer, with its graceful, recumbent figures, lavish illumination. Outside was comparative calm, some respite from the disturbing aura of splendid woman-kind and blue-veined romance, the thrills and possibilities of that maison d’élite. Here the two men paused, and Merceron made friends. Now they were back in their seats again, Merceron still active; sweeping the black cloud of gods that clustered like a swarm of flies upon the ceiling, and again the tiers of boxes and the broad reach of the stalls. And all the while Hutchinson did not know.

The curtain fell, and the orchestra ran down on the final bars. The applause was tempestuous and universal; recall followed recall. The conductor, too, was driven to share in the ovation.

The house rose, and Merceron dragged Hutchinson into the vestibule. A company of footmen stood to attention at the far end. The people streamed out, and down the broad staircase, crowding the spacious hall, and jostling our two friends.

“Let’s look at them!” said Merceron.

They stood aside and watched.

“This is Life!” said Merceron; “by Jove it is!” and his eyes fed on the gaily-robed procession, and he swelled now in this antechamber.

The silks and satins rustled, the gems gleamed, and the bright faces shone, radiant with recent emotion. The men were all athletic, the black and white of their dress distinction’s self. Nobody heeded Merceron, bending over this changing scene, ardent as a lover. Hutchinson’s interest, though keen, was but platonic.

The crowd was thinner now; the carriages were picking up the silks and satins, the men in black and white. Outside, the street was gay with lamps and glossy horseflesh.

“Supper,” said Hutchinson; “shall we go to the club?”

“No; I want more of this—men and women!” and Merceron took his arm, treading on air as they turned into the Strand. “I’ve wasted a lot of time,” he said—“a deuce of a lot!”

.“At it again?” said Hutchinson.

But Merceron was not to be silenced.

“Gounod’s a very great man,” he resumed; “but those people were greater!”

“Don’t see it,” came in reply.

“Gounod composed that opera, didn't he?— worked on it like a nigger. Result: a few detached fragments, selected moments, with great gaps in between. What he rescued is lovely enough; but think what remains!

And that audience was complete—complete, Hutchie, no gaps in that! It didn’t work; it didn’t smug itself bald; it was just its own wonderful self—and it beat Gounod, even Gounod!”

Hutchinson yawned.

“Didn’t you feel the blood under it all? Weren’t those women fine, and those men I had drinks with, weren’t they wonderful? Is this the supper-place?”

Hutchinson led, and Merceron followed. The house had a reputation of a sort, and was living up. to it.

The two men mixed lobster salad and champagne. Women, gorgeously attired and hectic with cosmetics, made eyes at them; and Merceron the glowing, Merceron the new-born, who, for three whole years, ever since he had gone down from Oxford, had shut himself away from London, recked only of Isabella and Horatio Sopwith, who to-night had once more issued forth into the common life, had dined and operaed, now grew discouraged.

Hutchinson was indifferent so long as his surroundings savoured of the metropolis. To-morrow he rejoined his ship.

“I wanted to continue,” said Merceron. “I wanted more Life—not this!”

A leering demirep turned away from his kindling eye.

“This is decay,” said Merceron, “decay!”

The naval officer continued his repast.

“That’s what we’re striving to repair, isn’t it?” he said, emptying a claw with his fork.

But Merceron was in earnest. “How are the fallen, mighty!” he moralised, startling Hutchinson, who ultimately laughed.

“Jolly good! jolly good! Did you get that out of a book?” enquired the sailor.

“Er—partly,” replied Harvey.

They rose and lef this gaudy Borderland, making for Merceron’s chambers, and puffing their cigars up Waterloo Place and Piccadilly. There was a big dance on at one of the houses on their route.

“Supposing we went in?” said Merceron, as they watched a carriage empty before the awning.

“We aren’t asked, are we?”

“The more fun!”

“But they’re masked.”

“The devil they are!” said Merceron. He reflected for a moment, and then his face cleared. “ Makes it ten times better—less risk,” he concluded.

“And the clothes?” asked Hutchinson.

“We’11 have to cab it to the Haymarket, or else—it’s all right; I’ve the Oxford things, mine and Charlie’s, We used ’em in Romeo," alluding to a performance of the Oxford U niver-sity Dramatic Society, “and we’ll use ’em to-night. Come on!” And Merceron hailed a hansom.

CHAPTER III
MERCERON DANCES.

T'HE two men drove on to Down Street and bade the cabman wait. Merceron worked the lift, and in a moment they were upstairs in the bedroom, and had switched on the electric light.

“Here they are!” cried Merceron, half buried in an old oak chest. He dragged the dominos out. A mask was pinned to each. Hutchinson's was bright red, and six inches of trouser-leg showed below; the other was black. Again the lift, and they rejoined their cab.

The awning still stood in front of the big house in Piccadilly, and Merceron sighed a sigh of relief. He had half feared that house and awning might vanish: so much did this adventure smack of fairy-tale. Everything, however, was real, solidly tangible.

They marched boldly into the hall, mounted the broad staircase with its sprinkling of powdered footmen and late-arriving guests. The lights within dazzled them.

“Good - night,” said Merceron, as they emerged from the cloak-room, “we hunt single.” He helped himself to a programme, waved a hand to Hutchinson, and disappeared in the crowded rooms.

For a ipoment the hubbub confused him. He had participated in nothing festive these last three years, had shut himself away from life with his work. Now his work was thrown to the winds, and he was going out to meet Life with wide-open arms.

A voice gave him his cue, took up the story of his abstinence — a falsetto voice, trilling pleasantly behind a yellow domino and mask.

“Why so late?” it asked.

“I was delayed.”

“Vague,” commented the domino.

“You might have intervened.”

“I?”

“By coming earlier.”

“A riddle—or flattery?” it queried.

“Truth,” said Merceron.

“You ’re not dancing?” asked the mask.

“I was waiting-—waiting for you—and you have taken your time!”

“Long?”, she tossed back.

“Three years.”

“Bless my soul, the man’s mad!”

“Only masked.”

A silvery laugh rippled behind the mask, a flicker of amusement lit the dark eyes, and the lady turned.

“Another riddle?” was her parting shot.

Merceron followed her.

“Don’t go,” he said, “I have kept all these for you.” And he displayed his empty programme.

“You have been generous,” laughed the lady.

“You will be more so?”

“Impossible!” as she took his arm.

They waltzed—Merceron like a master, the lady lightly as wind-blown down. Breath failed them at last.

“The little conservatory—shall we sit out?” she asked, recovering. She had forgotten her falsetto notes, the voice was her own, and rich with music.

Merceron turned to the right.

“This way,” she said, drawing him in the opposite direction. They left the crowd, and ascended a staircase. “I know the house, inside and out. They only ask you to their big things, I suppose ?”

“Are you fair or dark?” inquired Merceron. “You wear a hood.”

“Whichever you like,” she returned unabashed.

“A chameleon?”

She laughed again.

Merceron continued:

“We will take your beauty for granted; you are taking mine?”

The mask nodded, merry-eyed. He followed her down an empty corridor. A tiny conservatory was at the far end, and beyond was a tinier balcony, hidden away under the stars. Piccadilly ran into the moonlight on either hand, the Green Park was a sylvan foreground.

On the balcony sat a stout domino, deep in an arm-chair, and snoring with wide - open mouth. The lady laughed in its face, and it awoke, scared, showing a bald head to the stars.

“We are alone,” said the lady, as the stout domino fled.

“You were unkind.”

“To brush it away?” she asked.

“It was happy,” remarked Merceron.

“Perhaps it was even dreaming,” speculated the lady.

“You have hurt its feelings.”

“It will make a big supper.”

They were seated now, and the waltz-music, stringed, came faintly from the rooms below.

“It is really too warm for a dance—it’s absurd dancing in July,” said the lady.

“One should dance in the open, like they do at flower-shows, or in a Corot?” answered Merceron.

“One could dance at garden-parties, if they were later,” she hazarded.

“You did not lead me up here to discuss dancing,” said Merceron, severely. “You have a mission—out with it!”

The lady shrunk back.

“You have never spoken to me like that before—”

“Perfectly correct,” assented Merceron.

“And even if we are masked—you know perfectly well whom you are speaking to.”

“Not the foggiest idea.”

The lady laughed now.

“You pretend beautifully,” she said, “and I prefer your new voice to the real one,” she maliciously added.

“It shall be permanent.”

“Consider the strain!”

“For your sake?”

“That was sweet of you—take me downstairs before you get rude again.”

“I will, if you will?”

“What?”

“Give me another chance;” and Merceron extracted three waltzes and supper from the yellow domino. Then they returned to the ball-room.

“That is Lady May,” she whispered. Her gesture covered a slight pink domino. “Don’t forget me,” and she dropped his arm.

“I shall go up to the small conservatory if you’re not here,” returned Merceron, and he was alone.

So was Lady May. He accosted her without further ado, taking full advantage of his disguise.

“Pink suits you, you look well in pink,” he began, critically.

Silence and cold eyes behind a mask greeted this raillery.

“This is our dance—your ladyship has not forgotten?” urged Merceron, undeterred.

“ Is it?” said Lady May, in a voice dull and quite uninterested.

“You are cold?” suggested Merceron, bridling.

“Stifling, these things are so warm,” she drawled.

“ Why did you come?” he asked, and was rewarded by a stare so frigid that he almost laughed aloud. “We will dance?” He offered her an arm with a “May I, Lady May?”

“You may.”

“It must be terrible to have a name like that—always cropping up!” The girl’s arrogance annoyed Merceron. He was resolved on chastening it.

“If you don't like it, you may go,” she retorted.

“I love it so well, that I would never ask you to change it.”

A pink foot drummed the floor. Lady May was angry.

“I am not dancing, will you take me to a seat?” she said. Her former drawl was lacking.

“Shall be delighted,” answered Merceron. The rest of their way was silence and a bow.

The yellow domino swung by more than once; and Merceron watched her, impatient for a renewal. At last he claimed his own.

“Supper will be on directly, let’s get seats,” she said, as she took his arm and led the way downstairs.

A frantic domino in red, with six inches ol trouser-leg showing below, intercepted them. It was Hutchinson.

“I’m off,” he said, breathless; “they’re going to unmask— a girl told ine.”

The yellow domino was listening with some curiosity.

“Aren't you coming,” continued Hutchinson, “things may get unpleasant?”

“I’ve only mst begun — besides, there's supper,” returned Merceron, undisturbed.

“Well, if you won’t,” said Hutchinson, “ta-ta—I’ll look you up next leave,” he concluded, and went off to the cloak-room.

Merceron was about to apologise to bis partner, but she had gripped his arm with— “Aren’t you Captain Mills?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“But you dance alike—you’re exactly his figure.”

“We probably go to the same tailor,” suggested Merceron.

“Your voice—”

“You prefer it—shall we sit there?” and he led the way to a vacant table.

CHAPTER IV
MERCERON IS WIDE AWAKE.

WHY did your friend leave in alarm?” asked the yellow domino, as she and Harvey seated themselves at one of the supper-tables.

“He feared exposure.”

“Not much harm in it this weather—answer again?”

“They are going to unmask.”

“And he is hideous?”

“We came here uninvited,” said Merceron calmly.

“Who are you?”

“A liberated captive.”

“Then you will need a friend.”

“I have found one,” he gallantly replied.

“Do you know, I made sure that you were Captain Mills?” said the lady.

“You are disappointed?”

“No—not exactly,” she replied.

The rooms were filling fast as this conversation progressed, grew quite full. Everybody save Hutchinson seemed to be present. The pink domino stood in the doorway with a partner; another guest, stout and bald-headed, evidently he who had slumbered on the balcony, was seated, handling a mênu.

A gong clashed on the hubbub—once—twice.

“It is two o’clock, we must unmask,” said the yellow domino.

A hundred faces were exposed, hoods were falling back, the air was full of surprises and astonished laughter, satisfaction at deceits successfully carried out.

Merceron was gazing into a pair of lovely hazel eyes, set below hair of ruddy auburn. The face, though pale, was very beautiful, the half-exposed neck a dazzling-white. She, too, was not displeased with her companion’s appearance; his manner charmed her even more.

Their hostess, a stately dowager hung with ancestral jewels, sailed down the rooms to greet her guests by name.

The domino and Merceron exchanged a glance, their turn was imminent. The latter, unconcerned, filled his companion’s plate and his own, drank to her from a brimming wineglass. Then the Marchioness was on them.

“I brought a young friend with me,” explained the yellow domino with a subtle twinkle in the hazel eyes.

Merceron bowed, and the Marchioness was charmed. She gave him two jewelled fingers and passed on.

“ Why did you?” asked Merceron, with danger behind him.

“Appearances were against me,” laughed back the yellow domino; then, throwing her disguise aside, she stood out clear, gowned in amber satin with opals burning at her throat. “It was rather stuffy,” she remarked.

A white hand stole out to assist Merceron, struggling with his draperies; its touch thrilled him.

He, too, was good to look upon as he emerged, tall and well knit, from the inky folds of his domino.

They supped like children, greedy and helping each other as the dishes passed. Music came softly from the further room, the wine sparkled ruddy or golden, flashing back the lights that hung above. Gallantry and the full-framed spirit of greater comedy leapt through the fleeting moment; something barbaric and primeval snatched at the hearts of these revellers feasting careless before the dawn, spurred on this crowd, frankly joyous with youth and the rich blood of lives untrammelled. A pagan hour it was, and beauty swung in the ascendant; the spirit’s pale awakenings and wan-eyed tremors were all forgot—no place for white-lipped mediation.

“We dance no more?” said Merceron as they rose.

She took his arm and followed where he led.

“Let’s go up to the little balcony again and watch the sun rise?” he proposed as they passed out together.

“An Alpine notion,” she assented.

“Alpine is barbarous; they rouse you from slumber to yawn at an open-eyed sun.”

“We will be the sun—let it discover us,” she sent back. “I am ready;” and this time Merceron guided.

“It will be cold up there; I shall fetch the dominoes.” He was with her again in an instant, and they mounted.

The conservatory was ghastly with the clashing of day and artificial light. They left it behind them without unfair glances into each other’s face.

Beyond, the balcony hung deserted. Mer-ceron wrapped his partner in the silken folds of the dominoes, yellow on black. She passed a hand under his arm, and leant over the rampart. Below rumbled a heavy market waggon, stacked high with green-stuff, and making a persistent line for Covent Garden. The sky above was a cold blue, pale, with sparse silver twinklings of paler stars. The air, though cool, was far from chilling.

A cart, ruddy with a regiment of geraniums, went by, and annunciation lilies, white and tender, mingled with the pots. More stacks of vegetables followed, drawn by mechanical-stepping horses, whose drivers dozed torpid in their seats.

“Lc ventre de Londres—we are being fed,” said the lady with a grimace, “and garlanded.”

“Le cœur de I ondres—where is it?” retorted Merceron.

“Where?” she demurely echoed.

“Here!” His eyes were on the sky, now growing pink and sentimental. Cherubs might have flopped over it without causing comment. “Here!” his eyes came down, met hers.

“London has no heart,” she said.

“Six millions—think of them growing all so close together—no wonder some break!”

“Those are down below”—her gesture covered the street—“but we—are here—in the sunlight!” she rejoined, triumphant, challenging, glorying in her force and beauty. Her wrap was thrown aside: it shivered to tha ground and fell about her feet, and she stood radiant, with parted lips, in the first shaft of the ascending sun. Her enlumined hair shone like burnished bronze.

“Were I artist, I would paint you as Aurora,” said Merceron, kindling and captive. “You have imagination.”

“But no skill.”

“ More than you imagine.”

“Both were too much.”

“Not in this world,” and she looked round, her eyes embracing the object of her speech. This world was a, street silent with untouched morning, the green of a park verdant with dew and sunshine, and two happy mortals enthroned on a balcony. “Not in this world,”she repeated.

“No, not too much—no equipment were sufficing here!” He, too, was in Eden or Paradise or Elysium. He seized his houri’s hand. She withdrew it.

“Piccadilly will be crowded at noon,” she observed. He looked down upon the street. Her words had filled it with surging traffic and myriad pedestrians. The dawn had passed, and zenith midday was pulsing full and vehement . . . yet below ran but a roadway, empty save for the rare passing of a Covent Garden waggon! His eyes swept from below, to her and back again. Silence—everywh3ere was silence; broken at last, as a crowd of busy men appeared, armed with gigantic hose-pipes. The two revellers looked on, full of interest. Piccadilly was receiving its morning bath.

On the balcony now stood but a man and a woman. Poetry had left them; yet there is virtue in good prose.

“I am dreadfully tired,” said the lady.

“Shall I take you down?” asked Merceron, reluctant.

“I suppose so,” she murmured. Her arm lay heavy in his, yet the burden was as a feather. Neither was greatly inclined to change the present for recreant motion.

“ We will continue—when?” urged Merceron.

She met his questioning eyes, tenderly yet drooping.

“I may call—this afternoon?”

She smiled, soft, languid as a child weary with too much play. His heart leaped, exulted, flaming yet solicitous. She was adorable; he yearned madly to carry her down the intervening stairs, her arms heavy on his neck.

“This afternoon,” he repeated. Such words!

She shook her head; but her eyes were kinder. “This afternoon!” The staircase lay before them.

Below, the company was thinning and good-nights flew here and there. The lady was herself again, erect, serene as though but new arrived. She exchanged farewells, and Merceron waited. He was in the hall when she came down, cloaked from head to foot, calm, self-possessed—a guest departing. Many eyes were on them, admiring, envious. Merceron assisted her to her carriage—an earl’s coronet was on the panel. A hand lay lightly on his, the shadow of a hand’s pressure. She had not forgotten.

“An revoir,” said Merceron.

CHAPTER V
FIVE A.M. AND “ISABELLA.”

TT was five o’clock of a summer’s morning, and Merceron, his domino over his arm, was in the street, watching the lady’s carriage as it disappeared, rolling towards Knights-bridge.

Despite the hour, no vestige of fatigue did he display; rather was he elate, a being treading on air, ascending rainbows light-footed as a god, with song and melody on his lips, volatile within him. For Hope, Expectation, new-sprung and virginal, were his companions—as never in this life.

The way to his rooms was ho long one. He was at his door before he was well aware of any exercise; and there stood the old, familiar abode, in semi-darkness, with the sunshine struggling behind drawn blinds, unchanged, as he had always known it—but he, how altered, how foreign to this trim sobriety!

Merceron let in the light and the fresh air, lit a pipe, mixed a brimming tumbler of whisky and potass, threw off his coat and put on an old college blazer. Then he sat down with feet on the fender, and let the night’s work steal over his thoughts.

This review was all-sufficing. Over every phase of his adventure he dwelt, lover-like, ardent, and eager. His blood, long so latent, so torpid and confined, was warmed to sweetness by the renewal. After all, what were the past years, spent .studious and apart, but an apprenticeship ?—over now, behind him at last. He had served his term, was free once more and a man. He was rich, with youth and fortune equally untouched: he would give all to her, to that life of which she was the symbol, the supremest manifestation; to the fair, young world wherein he had dwelt unknowing these many years.

Over this ground he trod, repeating and repeating, and these thoughts were but the sweeter for their repetition. Now the last night came back to him in one continuous whole—no series of splendid moments like the Faust he had just witnessed, but as an opera of Wagner, a late one; richer even than this, for the world was his stage, his opera-house, libretto and setting had ranged themselves spontaneous, fallen truly as the rain of heaven, were no studied effort of cunningly-disciplined particles. Back, over all this ground he went, lingering at the dinner-table where light had first stolen in upon him, to the fair women, showing faces bright with anticipation and toying with delicate viands to the sound of music; then Hutchinson’s friendly countenance and the terrace overlooking London— London awakening to its evening release, its myriad lights opening upon the dusk like rows of enchanted flowers, a festive London—while below ran the river, slow moving, girt with the tender greys of its distances, soft, trailing shadows that climbed into the tinted sky. Afterwards, the busy streets that led to the great Opera House, where some of the world’s sweetest singers had thrilled him with some of the world’s sweetest melody; not him alone— for he had been but an atom, an infinitesimal part of that vast audience. A part of what? Of the very cream, of the topmost blossoming, of all that London boasted! He had formed a part of that magic coronal, pre-eminent, privileged, by right of its beauty, its health, its brilliance, and fastidious appetites. He had been part of this world; he would stay with it now, always—its life was the one Art! From thence he had descended to the supper-place: a passing through the fustian, the shoddy; a dip into a stream deceptively like the other, yet tainted from its very source, unclean with an invisible pollution. Away from there into his disguise, the music of the dance, the rhythm of harmonious motion, the dramatic semi-danger of his peculiar outrage. And yet this danger had been but illusive — what company would not have welcomed so ardent a recruit? And now, uppermost and chiefest, throned amid all this opulence, this pomp of splendid living, crowning his edifice, was a woman: the woman whose hand had rested on his arm as he and she stood looking down upon this same London of the night before— again awakening; now to no feverish release, but calm, vestal, throwing back mist and darkness, and uprising, glorious, golden, from out the dawn. Warm, living, this woman stood once more beside him, tall and perfect in her rare proportions, dark-eyed and with ruddy hair, the sweep of her full voice encompassing all emotion. He would be with her again, later, that very day!

His vehement thoughts, rose-tinted and intense with all desires, coloured with the full brush of young anticipation, now left the concrete, the particular, wandered off towards the general, the larger issues of this chase. The previous night was no longer a chain of incident, but a conquest. Had he not won a new and complete existence out of that which, but one short day ago, had been to him as a nothingness? Twenty-four hours!—his whole life lay in that twenty-four hours: the rest!— the rest had been work and futile strivings, the attempted appeasement of a hunger, an appetite which no life here below could effectually still, the service which men call Art. Before, he had faced the impossible and ultimate darkness; now, but twenty-four hours distant, and he had found the other way, the one, the right, the true path—a road hewn straight through the heart of Life, and bordered with love and all the graces.

No inkling of regret mingled with this awakening; his twenty-five years stood him in good stead. Young enough he was to smile unruffled over lost opportunity; old enough to exult in the youth, the measure of strong years that lay before him. His was the golden age. For a moment he stood aloof from himself, recognising the wealth that was his own. Vaguely he called to mind that there were men—men no older than he, too—who were already tired, spoilt, cynical; yes, men even of his few years who were prematurely weary, scarce capable of enjoyment. He might have been as these, disillusioned, spiritually dyspeptic! This verging Pharisaism disgusted him; he withdrew his attention to less comparative fields, to the present, the near future. What would these be! What would they not be! A passage in a play of Ibsen’s, John Gabriel Borkman, came back to him, struck home with a new force, a new meaning—a vision of enlightenment. He had hitherto been playing for the dancers; henceforth he was going to join in the dance—there lay his future.

Merceron rose, found the book, the scene that had flashed back, well-nigh prophetic. He read it aloud, doubling the parts of Borkman and Frida Foldal:

“Do you like playing dance music? At parties, I mean?” he asked as Borkman.

“Yes, when I can get an engagement. I can always earn a little in that way,” he answered as Frida.

“Is that the principal thing in your mind as you sit playing for the dancers?”

“No; I am generally thinking how hard it is that I mayn’t join in the dance myself.”

“That’s just what I wanted to know. Yes, yes, yes! That you mustn’t join in the dance, that’s the hardest thing of all. But there’s one thing that should make up to you for that, Frida.”

“What is that, Mr. Borkman?”

“The knowledge that you have ten times more music in you than all the dancers together.” And Merceron closed the volume with a bang.

No; he would no longer play for the dancers. Money, he had money in plenty! Fame, what was fame to him!—to him, who was going to join in the dance; to him, who had ten times more music in him than all the other dancers together! He knew this last, was certain of his power, had felt it last night as he moved, a figure leading and dominant, among strange crowds. The others recognised it too. How else would he have ventured so boldly to the attack of the lady in yellow, how else would she have received this attack with such unmistakable favour? Even his successful demolition of the arrogant Lady May, his trumpery triumph at the Opera bar, the promiscuous men whom he had attracted, magnetised, stood ample evidence in confirmation of this estimate . . . He had ten times more music in him than all the other dancers together, and instead of expressing it in written signs, he would live it; he himself would enjoy this luxuriance, this tenfold capacity—he, and he only. There should be no burdensome division between Art and Life — but Life, nothing but Life. And he was to live this Life. . . . He would make of it, and would wear it as some strange power; a force, baffling and compelling, impalpable and subtle, ever-present yet never manifest; a secret religion, a completed Pantheism, that should make him eminent—elusively eminent among mankind.

Within him, some small voice, a remnant, perhaps, of his former devotion, his old altruism, whispered, “Impossible!” The injustice of such advantage could not be. “Impossible!” whispered the voice.

“Possible, and I will prove it!” cried Merceron. “As for what has been, as for the past—there shall be no past—my life began to-day!”

One link, a something living and articulate that bound him to his former state, remained, testifying to what was, to what might be.

Three years had he spent upon its forging; three years, complete anil without break. Isabella, this score with its libretto; Isabella, his first opera, that represented the whole of his doing and being since he had quitted Oxford; Isabella, but newly finished and laid aside, must burn. His apprenticeship was over now; away with every shed and symbol of the chrysalis from which he had emerged! Isabella belonged to the past, was the past—away with Isabella!

Fire was the surest, the swiftest annihilator. Here were the matches, and over there the cabinet where this manuscript opera lay, carefully, cleanly piled, as he had stacked it three weeks since, after a last revision. The fireplace would be a ready crematorium. He found the key of the cabinet. All was ready for this burnt sacrifice, this first offering to the gods that were to watch over his new career. All was ready—save only Isabella. Before him yawned bare shelves and naked walls, an ironic void.

The lock of the cabinet was smashed, evidently forced from the outside. The key had turned round and round. The door hung loosely, and offered no resistance. It swung wide open almost as soon as he touched it. The cabinet was quite empty. Isabella, both the score and the libretto, had been stolen.

CHAPTER VI
“ISABELLA.”

WE have just accompanied young Harvey Merceron through as varied an entertainment as any that London affords the enterprising bachelor within so short a space of time; twelve hours, is not that the exact period which has elapsed between Hutchinson’s breezy entry and the discovery of Isabella's providential exit?

We have seen Merceron blink, as the sailor drove him forth into the sunlight; we have seen him shake off lethargy and inaction, and run such riot as man too seldom enjoys. We have, all of us, looked on with envy; some few, even, have had courage to openly express approval of an example so successfully and consistently lawless. And, at the end, we have followed the prodigal home and listened with sceptic smile to his own impassioned version of events that, duly considered, are but the commonplaces of every-day experience— every-day experience properly footing it through an accustomed world.

And now, having heard him declaim, our smile relaxes. Some of us, indeed, are wisely shaking prudent heads, as they watch this youth, wrapped in a college blazer, devise an unlimited paradise upon so slender a foundation: quite undeterred is he by any thought of Providence; of Providence, that upright merchant, steadfastly exacting a fair and lawful price for even the least of his wares. No such inevitable payment does young Harvey Merceron contemplate.

Instead, has he not raised violent hands, nor are his eyes lowered in humility; instead, does he not wish to burn his ships, leave himself no refuge should his quest, his conjurations, have proved futile. No lap wherein to hide his face should he return empty-handed does he reserve, not even such solace as might have afforded him Isabella.

Let us hear more of Isabella; for is she not a something vital, a strip, several strips, a reach, upon her master’s pathway? Were not she and Horatio Sopwith sole diversions of the hermit Merceron — the Merceron of yesterday?

Six years had passed since Harvey left his school and went up to Oxford. As a youth he was remarkable for the largeness of his ambitions. Even when newly arrived at the Unh’ersity which was to give him his musical degree, the sad history of Isabella and Lorenzo had attracted him as a fitting subject for his first enterprise. The story contained all the elements of grand opera, seemed manifestly designed to furnish a music-drama of the highest order. He resolved upon attacking it so soon as he should be done with examiners, as leisure and serious working days lay before him. Meanwhile, he was content to discuss his plans with Sopwith. He had sometimes hesitated between Isabella and Francesca of Rimini. They were both subjects eminently suitable: Wagner would most certainly have treated both of them had he not been otherwise employed; and what was good enough for Wagner was assuredly of sufficient importance to merit the attention of that master’s admiring student, Harvey Merceron to wit. Sopwith had been intelligently sympathetic, had listened, keenly interested in either undertaking.

Sopwith and Harvey were the only men of their year reading for a musical degree at their particular college, and thus, a common programme had thrown them together from the outset. Later, they had worked together, had joined the same clubs, attended the same lectures, grinned at the same tobacconist’s daughter, played the same games, and, finally, had been examined side by side and had received their degrees upon the same morning. Sopwith, a smart enough youth, with gifts more receptive than imaginative, was glad to profit by this constant intercourse with a man of such rare instinctive faculty and innate vocation; for he had speedily recognised in Merceron certain generous though undisciplined forces which no don or professional teacher lavished in equal measure. Harvey was to Sopwith a chronic source of infection; and he, for his part, was pleased at having found so willing a listener, was gratified by the other’s implied acceptance of himself as leader in their joint undertakings; admitted, too, Sopwith’s practical outlook and good sense, and their value as a corrective to his own more fiery temperament. The two men, thus admirably assorted, were constantly together; and, later on, when they both resettled themselves in London, this friendship, begun up at the ’Varsity, prospered and grew venerable.

Even at their earliest meetings had Merceron and Sopwith discussed the merits of Isabella and Francesca of Rimini. The themes, they had agreed, were nearly identical; and M er-ceron, enlarging on this point, had roundly asserted that “You’ve only got to alter your libretto, and one score would almost do for the pair of them—especially in the second act, and it’s the second act that takes the most doing,” he had sagely added. Harvey, at that time, conceived all his operas in three acts, with the climax, amorous for the most part, in the middle one.

“Both deal with clandestine love, clandestine meetings, and violent death—look here, Sopwith, you take one, and I’ll do the other?” he had remarked upon another and similar occasion.

“But mustn't we begin at the beginning?— and an opera’s rather in the middle,” replied the soberer Sopwith.

“The beginning is where one begins, and, if we begin in the middle, it’s all right,” retorted Merceron, logical for once. “How would King Lear or The Cenex suit you?” he proposed after an interval.

“I think 1’ll get that degree first, if you don’t mind,” from Sopwith.

This made Harvey laugh.

On going down from Oxford and moving into the Down Street Chambers, he had definitely decided upon handling the story of the unfortunate Isabella. It was simpler than any of the others, and the second act gave him a like opportunity; which, after all, was the main consideration.

Sopwith, who had taken an even better degree than Merceron, set up for himself in one of a deserted-looking row of houses that formed part of a cul-de-sac which bewildered the straggler into Bloomsbury. He had but a small allowance, just sufficent to manage upon if carefully expended, and rooms in this loose end of a thoroughfare were cheap and spacious, their tenants unrestricted.

Merceron, thus safely installed, had at once proceeded to shut himself up with Isabella. His libretto he attended to in person; he had some literary ability, and the notion of any outsider interposing between himself and his beloved work hardly appealed to him. Sopwith, he thought, would prove a sufficient check to any extravagance, and was, besides, a familiar worker in the same field.

Months passed, and Merceron remained deep in his labours, with an occasional 'visit from his brother-musician or a run down to Hertfordshire to see his people for sole distractions. He lost touch with his other Oxford friends; and as the work grew, and he became more and more immersed, the last social links, rites, and observances were dropped, and Merceron, happily absorbed, stood alone in London with only Isabella, the near Park, and Sop with left to him—the world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Sopwith, who came in regularly to compare notes and see how Isabella was progressing, was always a welcome visitor. He would listen with an unfailing patience while Merceron ran over the latest additions to the pile of manuscript, or explained how these results had been obtained, or, as was often the case, had not been obtained. Sopwith’s constancy had its reward; for, was not the outcome of all this eager experiment and labour entirely at his service? He meanwhile, though an interested spectator, was content with a less soaring ambition, devoted, indeed, a certain portion of his time and talents to the composition of settings for the metrical effusions of wealthy amateurs. Such patrons paid him well for his trouble, and insisted that their names should appear in large type on the cover of songs, the cost of whose publication they also defrayed. This arrangement Sopwith not only countenanced, but courted into the bargain. He also went much to other people’s houses, urging Merceron to do the same.

“How do you think you are going to get Isabella put on, if you don’t know people?” Sopwith would exclaim when Merceron ignored these precepts. He expounded further, “It’s all interest. Merit be blowed; you’ve got to know people first, you’ve got to get somebody influential to take you up and make people talk about you. Look at So-and-so and So-and-so,” and here he would rattle off half-a-dozen names well known in the musical world.

“But I’m not So-and-so and So-and-so,” Merceron would reply unmoved.

Sopwith, however, only shook his head. “You’ve got to get yourself talked about,” he insisted, “so that everybody knows who you are, and then when anybody wants any music they come to you, even if they’ve never heard a bar of your work. They’ve heard your name, and that's all they want. In England, people don’t know much about these things, and music is just like soap or patent medicine.”

“But we ’re going to change all that,” said Harvey.

“Not just now, old chap. And just now people are buying the brand they see and hear most about—and I’m taking precious care they hear a deal about Horatio Sopwith!”

The author of these remarks was in so far right, that when Isabella neared completion Merceron’s was a name unknown, while Horatio Sopwith’s songs were in evidence at all the principal music-sellers—so much so, that their composer was enabled to occupy and furnish a cosy flat situate in Bayswater. Occasionally, one of these compositions would catch Merceron’s eye as he passed a shop-window, and once or twice he had entered and purchased, run rapidly over the setting and marvelled at Sopwith’s lack of courage. A reminiscence, always a reminiscence, some sort of a borrowing or another, were these trifles. He had chaffed Sopwith about these variations on the familiar, but the latter had only shrugged his shoulders.

“What am I to do?” he would explain. “I ’m not independent like you are, so I can’t afford to refuse the things; and besides, nobody knows the difference.”

Merceron looked reproval—this was indeed degeneracy.

“My dear boy,” returned Sopwith, “I can’t afford to waste time doing original drawingroom songs and comic-opera inlays for the idiots. You wait till I’ve a chance of choosing my own work, and then I ’ll astonish you; but now—” and the speaker, perfectly dressed in the latest of late fashions, correct even to the pearl-headed pins that kept his necktie in position, would proceed to deplore his lugubrious circumstances and the straitened resources which condemned him to such a present state of unworthy drudgery.

And so through these three years the pair of them had progressed, each in his own way; Merceron going deeper and ever deeper into his work, discovering technical and tone secrets which no Oxford or other don has yet imparted, learning day for day in that most personal and thorough of all universities—Experience. So that when first he appears in these pages, with Isabella well behind him, he might really have begun to compose something noways discreditable. Doubt came to him and fear, often and often again, as he went on thus blindly with his task, caring little, dreaming little of all that lay beyond; but doubt and fear were courageously swept aside or smiled over; and when Sopwith paid his weekly call and sat listening with unconcealed admiration to these new pages, the reward was sufficing and Merceron dared continue.

Isabella drew towards its close, and now Sopwith’s visits grew scarcer.

“The opera season is on,” he explained, “and I’m going to make hay.” He had met the impresario, was trying hard to arouse that worthy’s interest; and he mentioned also the namfe of a great lady, one who reigned supreme in the musical world, and whom he fancied he had quite won over to his side. His chance had come at last; he would turn out no more songs and waltzes and—here the pair of them shuddered—polkas! Not only might he engage in something lofty, but he would stand a fair chance of getting his work produced, and that without delay.

And now the impresario figured constantly in his conversation, partnered by that great lady who was able to move mountains—

Sopwith had evidently become a shadow stalking this all-important .functionary and h.s exorciser from bed to board and backwards. He now spoke seriously of beginning his magnum opus.

“Why don’t you start now?” cried Harvey, delighted at the change, “now—and do take one of our subjects, the ones we used to talk over at Oxford, Francesca or King Lear or The Cenex—why not Francesca? The second act is just like mine, you know, and it’ll be such fun to compare, and I can help you a bit—you see, I’ve nearly got mine behind me 1”

And then and there it was agreed that Sopwith was “to tackle Francesca.”

It was about this time that the finale- of Isabella was set down, under these conditions, in this utter quiet. Upon it had followed three weeks of helpless idling, during which Merceron had tossed anchorless, restless and yet without definite pursuit or object, till there arose that hot July afternoon which saw Hutchinson enter his chambers, drag him out of doors, plunge with him into that larger world which he had half forgotten—to the foundering of all his plans and philosophies.

CHAPTER VII
MERCERON GOES TO BED.

WE left Merceron staring blankly into the empty cabinet, at its broken lock and damaged door.

As the situation opened to him, as he realised that Isabella had escaped him, he burst out laughing. “Saved me the trouble, whoever you are!” he cried, throwing the box of matches on to a near table. “Saved me the trouble—dashed silly thing to steal, though!”he protested.

Despite these unconcerned exclamations, the thought of ringing up and interrogating his man occurred to him as he turned away, still laughing; but it was too early in the morning 84 for Hancock to be astir, and he wasn’t “going to wake the beggar; hardly worth while, hanged if it is!” he repeated mirthfully, addressing the violated piece of furniture, that still yawned painfully in the background. Harvey went back and closed its open door. “Rather a pull up, wasn’t it?” said he; “quite the ‘hand of Fate ’ we hear so much about!”

“Funny notion, though, coming up here and taking Isabella, and leaving the other things,” he mused, resuming his seat before the fireplace; “I wonder what they want it for?” Some faint regrets had mingled with his mirth: for, after all, was not Isabella a witness to years of industry and aspiration; as a souvenir alone, had merited preservation? And then he might have shown her to the yellow domino; perhaps she would have been interested . Bah, he was no longer a musician, but a man, merely a man! This afternoon there would be greater music than any he might ever compose! It was well that Isabella had passed out of his life; she had no place in the new existence that spread before him. He was going to listen now! Other men could spend their lives over Isabellas; as for him, he was going to sit in his stall and enjoy. The clock on the mantelpiece caught his eye, interrupted his reflections. It was close on seven—had he not better go to bed for a few hours? It would be absurd for him to resume in the afternoon, tired-out and yawning. And he must also look in at his tailor’s, for he had hardly a decent coat in his wardrobe. Clothes had troubled him very little of late.

Merceron retired to his bedroom and went to sleep. At eleven he awoke, feeling rather clammy and dissipated. A bath revived him. As he dressed, he recollected that he had asked Sopwith to look in the night before and talk Francesca over with him, and that he had gone out with Hutchinson, completely forgetful of this prior engagement. He was meditating an apology, when a connection between the sudden disappearance of Isabella and Sopwith’s call appeared to him as in some measure possible.

“No, Sopwith isn’t that sort!” exclaimed Merceron, scouting the idea —it was too unpalatable; “and, besides, he’s pegging away at one of his own—at Francesca!”

“And yet,” persisted reason, “who else would take a pile of music; and hardly anyone but Sopwith knows I’ve done it? I’d have given it to him for the asking . . . perhaps he only ...”

Here Merceron turned aside, deferring other speculations, hoping against hope. He rang, instead, for shaving-water and breakfast.

“By-the-by, Hancock,” he carelessly inquired, as the man returned, “were you in last night? ”

“Yes, sir.”

Harvey’s eyes were on his servant’s facet here surely was no stealer of operas—absurd!

“Did anybody call after I went out?” he continued, selecting a razor.

“A gentleman, sir; he wouldn’t leave his name or any message. He said he’d wait a little as you were out, sir; and, as he was a gentleman, I showed him into the sitting-room.”

Merceron was puzzled, but suppressed his interest, asking only in the same indifferent tone:

“Did he stay long?”

“About half an hour, sir; I thought—”

“Mr. Sopwith didn’t look in?” interrupted Harvey.

“No, sir.”

Merceron was pleased; relieved as well.

“All right,” he said, closing the interview.

What was the use of following up the matter? As for h s mysterious visitor, he would leave him to his defective conscience, and the critics. He was glad, more than glad, that his doubts regarding Sopwith had been so promptly dispelled. A note from that suspect, lying beside the breakfast things, banished the last of these unwelcome fears. Yesterday’s date headed it.

“Dear old chap,” it ran, “I was up the river all day, and got back to town too late to come in this evening. Sorry to disappoint you; write and fix another day. Friday or sometime next week will do.”

“What a cad I was to think poor old Sop had taken the thing!” exclaimed Merceron over this message. “I must write to him.” And he did so as soon as he had breakfasted.

“Come in again,” he wrote. “Give me a clear day’s notice first though, as I have taken your advice and am going out to see the world. What do you think has become of Isabella? You won’t believe it; but some idiot seems to have walked in last night and made off with her. It seems the funnier, because I’ve given up work for good, and wouldn’t quite have known what to do with Isabella had the idiot stayed at home. I’m going to listen to you other fellows in future; so mind you hurry up with Francesca, and make her worth listening to.”

“Hang it all, I’m forgetting all about this afternoon 1” cried Harvey, as he closed the envelope that covered this note. Whereupon, he arose and went to the window.

“ Looks like rain,” as he inspected the fragment of heavy sky visible above the opposite side of Down Street. “Hope it ’ll turn fine again!”

He had forgotten all about Sopwith and Isabella; stood once more upon that balcony overlooking the Green Park and Piccadilly.

CHAPTER VIII
AN EARL’S CORONET, A YELLOW DOMINO, AND KNIGHTSBRIDGE.

BEFORE turning in at his club that morning, Merceron marched off to Bond Street, where he bought a new hat and several pairs of the latest shade of gloves. He also found some boots that fitted him, and looked, besides, ever so much smarter than anything he had previously worn. Thence to his tailor’s, whom he astonished with the most extensive order he had ever bestowed in that direction. He went to his bank as well, and filled his pocket with sovereigns and notes; why, he hardly knew, but it all seemed part of the new life whose continuance was now so close at hand. From here to his club, where he lunched as lightly as the bill of fare would permit.

Merceron’s club was a small and, as these things go, a rather select institution; its address, a biggish house in Piccadilly that had once been private. He knew very few of the members—it had been to him more of a convenience than a social centre—and not even a casual acquaintance was in the dining-room as he sat down to his meal. There entered, indeed, a certain Carter-Page, a man whom he had known at Oxford, but who, for some reason of his own, had thought fit to ignore Merceron upon their re-colliding in town. Harvey had not lingered over the incident; he had had little time to give to Carter-Page, a familiar enough type of middle-class opportunist.

To-day, however, Carter-Page seemed to recover his memory. He nodded quite genially as he came down the room.

“I wonder whether he saw me come in? It’s that hat, and the gloves and boots;— thinks I’ve got a rise of some sort!” was Harvey’s ungenerous interpretation of this altered demeanour.

But Carter-Page was not content with a nod; must needs come and take lunch at the same table.

“Didn’t know you belonged—just joined, I suppose?” remarked Carter-Page, referring to the club.

“Three years ago,” said Harvey.

“Really? Ought to have seen you before then; but I’m rather slack.”

“Fellows used to say so at Oxford,” from Harvey.

“You were at The House, weren’t you?”asked Carter-Page, not visibly disconcerted.

“No.”

“Rather jolly club this,—quiet, you know: not quite smart, but so-so,” he observed. “Ever play pills here?”

“Haven’t touched a cue for ages.”

“How do you like living in town? You go out a great deal, I suppose? Not working much, are you?”

“No; not at all.”

“You chaps are lucky,” said Carter-Page, with the air of a galley-slave. He was articled to a firm of solicitors, at whose office he turned up whenever he had nothing better to do. “You chaps are lucky. And there’s always plenty going,—season’s nearly over, though. I suppose you ’ll go abroad?”

“I don’t know,” returned Harvey, who was obviously expected to say something. He rose to go.

“See you again: I usually lunch and look at the papers here. You ’re a bit fagged? Don’t look it, though.”

“Morning,” said Merceron.

It was time for action. A minute or two later, Harvey, gripping his umbrella, set out for the Park. He would be able to think there. As yet he had but trusted; but now he would want all his wits.

It was close on three o’clock, and the heavy clouds that darkened the midsummer sky, whose forerunners had already filled Merceron with a certain amount of indignation, now began to threaten. Large drops, falling singly, were their next intimation. Why was he not allowed to ponder undisturbed?

By the time he reached the Serpentine, the Park was dismal with fast pattering rain; the near bridge crossed a sheet of water from which Cockney oarsmen were fleeing in disgust. Who was she? Where did she live?

“An earl’s coronet and a yellow domino.”

Harvey had already repeated this formula a dozen times: how could he discover more?

He was on the bridge, had halted midway, and was now looking down into the water as though half expecting to find his answer there.

" An earl’s coronet and a yellow domino that had driven off towards Knightsbridge?”

He leaned over the parapet retelling these three beads. More—how could he discover more? and he stared ahead and round about, unmindful of the inclement downpour, trying to see beyond this trio, to enlarge this brief rosary. The landscape grew familiar, its detail noticeable,—dark sky, dripping foliage, and leaden water; the seats and benches along the shore were deserted; a man was moving among the chairs, placing them face to face so as to keep them dry. It was half-past three, and he had promised to call that afternoon. Where—- where—where? Who—who—who? “An earl’s coronet, a yellow domino, and Knightsbridge.”

And now at last the first dull shaft of doubt grazed him, then a second that bruised. What a fool he had been not to ask her who she was, where she lived! Why had he not done so? She would have told him—he had been so near to her. And, brightening his misery, that moment came back to him; that moment of semi-surrender, brief, entrancing, when she had leant so heavy on his arm and looked up at him through half-closed eyes, and he had whispered, “This afternoon — this afternoon!” These words returned, mocking, bitter, extinguishing the light that had stolen over his anguish, now intensified. What a fool he had been!

Why had he not asked, asked—instead of fearing the commonplace question, the return to facts, and their jarring? This—this gazing at sky and water from under a dripping umbrella- -was this not commonplace, jarring, a damper? Cold water enough for sure! He looked about him. Dismal—how dismal! Rain—how it rained 1 And the landscape 1— now a possession, every line bitten into his mind; he could have gone home and reproduced it from memory alone, down to the one steeple that showed above the foliage, a slim, tapering thing, studded with points like a cactus!

And now his doubts, single at first, came crowding; where they had grazed and bruised, they pierced and sickened. Perhaps he would never find her again; perhaps she would leave London; perhaps to-day or to-morrow—perhaps was legion. His heart sank the deeper with each new possibility; and worst, most hateful of all, was his knowledge—a mocking, cruel voice this—his consciousness of the utter futility of his new programme, new philosophy, unless he could obtain this woman’s help. For had he not built his new life up around her— was she not the heart of it and the kernel, its keystone, its Leit-motif? Without her, it could not be lived. The rest—the rest was lifeless; without her animating spirit, dead, soulless, profitless!

The rain still poured, the Park was near deserted. The rare passers-by hurried on regardless of all but their present scurryings towards shelter; oblivious to Merceron, to Merceron’s assailment of doubt and fear and welling bitterness as he stood thinking on that forsaken structure—“An earl’s coronet, a yellow domino that drove off towards Knightsbridge?” What a fool. he was to entertain, why waste more time over, such a figment! His quest had been hopeless from the outset, an impossible conundrum—why follow it further? He looked below, the raindrops pitted the water’s surface. Above, the clouds had grown still darker; the foliage was almost black. The landscape, with a skyline reaching from Kensington to Mayfair, had now become an obsession, a thing hateful yet persistent. He closed his eyes, it was still there.

Yet darker grew the clouds, and the rain continued. The new hat had lost much of its gloss, the patent leather of the new boots was dulling. He would go away; perhaps he might find the house in Piccadilly whose awning had invited them last night. But what could he ask for, and for whom? “An earl’s coronet . . .?” He checked himself, he had had enough of that formula! Out of the heavy sky flashed a first streak of lightning, then thunder. The interval was filled by Merceron’s cry:

“I have it — that man, Carter-Page — he knows—of course he knows!”

Merceron ran off to get a cab.

“I must find the little beast,” he muttered on the way. “Of course he knows, Why was he so affable?—he’s cut me for three years, and now—thank the merciful God that created snobs! Somebody must have told him that I was at that house last night, or else he saw me there, and she’s—‘ An earl’s coronet, a yellow domino, and Knightsbridge!” cried Merceron joyfully, as he hailed the cab that drove him back to his club.

CHAPTER IX
SNOB TO THE RESCUE.

THE Countess of Grasmere, for such was the style and designation of Merceron’s new acquaintance, had slept with extreme soundness after the Marchioness’s ball. It was late in the morning when she awoke.

In the deliciously comfortable half-hour before rising, the recent event, and more especially her own part in it, returned, echo of a pleasurable comedy. She smiled over each distant scene; never had fairy-tale and romance, paradoxically near and removed as they were, seemed so actual. This dance was one of those rare festivities that stand apart from the ruck. The figure of her foremost partner led this train. He had, ndeed, been delightful: and she set to wondering whether she would ever see him again; whether he would really call—was it not that very afternoon that he was to reappear? They had behaved like a pair of reckless children—how young they had been! Perhaps he would call —but the next day was so different to far-away balconies! And the Countess sighed. After all, it was but charming fairy-tale; and the book was closed, the story ended.

Lady Grasmere sent her maid to find Mrs. Hodgson; and when that lady appeared, she was told to sit down on the bed and listen.

Mrs. Hodgson was middle-aged and benevolent, her eyes twinkled humorously and her mouth curved merrily upwards; half guest, half companion, she had spent that season with the Countess at the house in Albert Gate.

Her ladyship told of last night, and Mrs. Hodgson smiled. Her ladyship only told half.

“Shocking,” said Mrs. Hodgson, “I’m surprised at you!” She was laughing.

“And if he should call?” asked the Countess.

“My dear!”

“I wish he would.”

“ Gertrude I”

“I’m sure you would like him.”

“So am I,” said Mrs. Hodgson. “But these young m„n,” and she wagged her head warningly, “one never can tell.”

“You’d better not!” laughed the Countess.

“I wonder what he must think of youl” exclaimed Mrs. Hodgson.

“I know.”

“So do I,” said Mrs. Kodgson, patting the Countess’ head.

“He said ne loved me,” said the Countess.

“Gertrude, how can you?”

“He didn’t—but I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry about?” asked Mrs. Hodgson.

“It’s all over,” said the Countess. It really did seem a pity that she should see no more of this masterful unknown quantity whose exuberant vitality had given her some of the keenest moments of that fast-dying season. “Why couldn’t I have met him in the ordinary way?” she asked petulantly.

“It wouldn’t have been half such fun,” said Mrs. Hodgson, her eyes twinkling more than ever.

“Not a quarter,” said the Countess.

“Is this all you wanted me for?” asked Mrs. Hodgson, rising. Her voice betokened deep disappointment.

“Isn’t it plenty?” asked the Countess.

“You ’re going?”

“I am, madam; your frivolity is—most charming,” and Mrs. Hodgson swept out, amid a peal of laughter from the bed.

The Countess remained, her morning collation well within reach. She was still thinking of Harvey. He interested her. The audacity of his uninvited presence at the Stoke ball, one of the most exclusive 'functions of the year, delighted her—and he had carried his intrusion off so well!

He was unmistakably a gentleman, his good looks and bearing beyond question. “He wasn’t rude once—and he could have been,” she reflected. He had clearly embarked on his adventure for adventure’s sake. Would she ever see him again? He might find her out; but then she was evidently as strange to him as he to her, and he had asked no questions« There were no clues, absolutely none. Even his face, she pondered, was new to her, and by degrees one really got to know almost every face in town.

“Etiquette is very silly—I wish I had asked him to call,” said the Countess, as she nibbled her luncheon.

“So do I,” replied Mrs. Hodgson.

“One doesn’t do these things,” replied the Countess.

“I should hope not,” said Mrs. Hodgson. After a sufficient pause she added, “He might have asked permission.’

“That’s all he did ask,” sighed the Countess.

“Then he will come,” asserted Mrs. Hodgson.

“But he knows nothing—and he’s a perfect innocent.”

“The more reason.”

“Adam on his honeymoon must have behaved like this man,” said Lady Grasmere.

“What a notion!” Mrs. Hodgson then turned to the brooding sky. “I told Mrs.

Pretty I’d go with her to that new palmist everybody’s talking about, and it’s going to rain.”

“So you 're going out?”

“To have my fortune told.”

“If he calls shall I receive him?”

“You may, if you promise—”

“Promise?”

“To keep him till I come back,” said Mrs. Hodgson.

“I ’ll only allow you one look,” said the Countess.

After lunch Mrs. Hodgson busied herself* with the manufacture of a corduroy waistcoat, a problem in silk and wool and paper, whose solution was to keep Mr. Hodgson’s chest warm during subsequent winters. The Countess alternately answered her letters and looked out of the window at the rain.

“I wish it wouldn’t,”protested Mrs. Hodgson.

At four o’clock came lightning and thunder. “I can’t go out in this weather,” she added.

The Countess went to her room. It grew so dark that Mrs. Hodgson had to lay the waistcoat aside.

“Gertrude seems a trifle disordered,” she remarked to the world at large. “But Gertrude has very good taste — it's the same as mine.”

Meanwhile, Merceron was driving back to his club, arranging his plan of attack as the cab covered the intervening ground. Arrived, he casually inquired of the porter whether Carter-Page had left.

The man’s “No, sir,” was worth banknotes.

With the same assumption of leisure Harvey proceeded to search the building. He found Carter-Page in the billiard-room, cue in hand.

This time it was Harvey who nodded and took a seat.

“Rather a good stroke that,” he observed critically, and lit a cigarette.

“Not bad,'’ assented Carter-Page, figuring out a cannon.

“Why didn’t you play at the red and go in?” asked Harvey, greatly interested, as the cannon failed.

“I’m not specially good at long shots;” and Carter-Page stood aside and watched his opponent.

“Neat,” said Harvey, as the latter went in off the red.

“Have a drink?” said Carter-Page.

“Yes—I’m a bit cheap, was dancing half the night,” remarked Harvey—his first move in this other game of pump.

“Stoke House?” inquired Carter-Page.

“I ’ll trouble you for the ‘ rest.’”

Harvey handed it to him. “I ’ll trouble you for the rest—Stoke House—that’s one to me! ” was his inward cry.

“Thirty-four—forty-five,” said Carter-Page coming out of play.

“It was rather fun—masks and dominos, you know. But you were there too, I suppose?”

“No—”

“ You ’re not a dancing man?” Harvey agreeably suggested.

“Dashed poor leave that!” and Carter-Page moved away and pocketed the red. “Hard lines!” from Harvey, as he almost cannoned. The white fluked in. Carter-Page continued. The break yielded fifteen—and all the while Harvey looked on with brow unclouded.

“Rather a run that,” he said, as Carter-Page lowered his cue.

Then the other man scored.

A servant brought Harvey a whisky-and-soda, which he was obliged to taste.

“Don’t care for dances?” he enquired, as he set the glass down again.

“Oh! yes, I do. I don’t know the Stbkes, though. Bonner, do you remember him?”

“Bonner of New?” asked Harvey.

“Yes. He was there—you were rather in luck,” said Carter-Page with a grin.

“Forty-nine—sixty-two,” said the enemy.

Harvey’s heart was rising—he was nearer, much nearer.

Carter-Page pocketed and went in, brought off an easy cannon, another, and failed to go in off the red.

“Can’t do anything when it’s under the cushion,” he declared.

“Hard lines,” sympathised Harvey; “you weren’t in luck if I was—don’t quite see where mine comes in, though.”

“Luck?” asked Carter-Page.

“You just mentioned the article.”

“Oh, yes—Lady Grasmere,—you were rather making the pace.”

Harvey was clinging to the name like grim death.

“An old friend,” he remarked.

Carter-Page seemed impressed. He had to play in baulk, and missed.

“Have a cigarette?” said Harvey; “I’m just going over to the reading-room—may see you later on ?”

“I ’ll come up afterwards; the weather's much too beastly to do anything,” said Carter-Page.

“Grasmere—he said Grasmere!” Harvey had rushed upstairs, had pulled down the big directory. “Law—Commercial—Court—Court, that '11 be it ... ‘ Grasmere, Countess of,’”his finger was on the line, he had the direction.

Soiled hat and dripping umbrella, what did they matter!

Ten mintes later his hansom drew up at the house in Albert Gate.

Before him stood a dainty red-brick mansion, freshly picked out with white and gay with well-filled window-boxes. He looked up, the sky was clearing; facing him was the equestrian statue of a recent general and the point of a wedge whose sides formed two important main roads.

A man opened to him. Was Lady Grasmere at home? The man would go and see. His name?

‘ Merceron.”

“Mr. Mason?”

Harvey, palpitating, was shown into a room, and waited.

Presently the man returned and deferentially took possession of Harvey’s umbrella, then led the way up thickly-carpeted stairs to a charmingly furnished drawing-room.

A middle-aged lady received him. Had he come to the wrong house?

“Dreadful weather, Mr. Marsden.” That man had evidently corrupted his name a second time.

“ Very,” assented Harvey. What did this mean, and where was he?

“Cats and dogs,” said Mrs. Hodgson.

“Certainly,” said Harvey, his perplexity increasing.

Light at last! The Countess had laughingly interposed. She entered, little changed from the woman of last night, was wearing blue instead of yellow.

“Mrs. Hodgson,” said the Countess. Harvey bowed. “But she has to take a friend to get their fortunes told.”

“Unfortunately,” said Mrs. Hodgson. aq“Can we spare her?” asked the Countess.

Harvey only smiled—the best thing he could have done.

“Nice face, nice smile; beware!” whispered Mrs. Hodgson at the door. The Countess closed it on her.

They were alone now, and Merceron was looking up at his companion in a rebound of happiness, almost doubting the evidence of his five senses. His eyes wandered from his hostess, roamed round the exquisite interior, to its hundred and one knick-knacks in silver and china and glass, its photographs of unknown faces, and the unfamiliar pictures on the walls; and he was glad.

CHAPTER X
THE GATES OPEN.

MERCERON sat in the seventh heaven and sipped his tea.

“So you’ve found me out!” the Countess had just observed.

“It was my turn,” he answered with a laugh, recalling his own confessions of the night before.

“But so soon!”

“Did you doubt my success?”

“I was not so modest,” she answered, smiling; “besides, you had threatened.”

“‘ This afternoon! ’” he quoted.

“Are you always so sure?”

“The gods fought on my side;” and he told her how he had soliloquised in the Park, of Carter-Page, and the crafty extraction of “Stoke House” and “Lady Grasmere.” Like most men who have lived much alone, Harvey recounted each incident with the personal zest and elaborations of a professed story-teller.

“And that is all you know?” she asked, as he concluded.

“That—and you!”

“No more?”

“I am content,” he replied, unmistakably sincere.

“Don’t you want to? "

“Not specially. Do you?”

“You have never studied Burke?”

“I once looked at Debrett.”

“For whom?”

“Lady A.,” said' Merceron, helping himself to a cucumber sandwich. “Lady A. is the only member of the aristocracy who ever aroused my interest; and she was fraudulent.” The Countess looked at him wonderingly.

He hastened to her relief.

“Lady A.,” he explained, “is the only titled person I ever pondered over and delighted in; and she was — I regret to say it—an impostor.”

“Explain!” said the Countess.

Merceron smiled over this show of alarm, and continued with the same zest as had marked his account of the Carter-Page incident:

“I was staying at a small seaside town one summer, and so was Lady A. A child in the house, a niece of my landlady and a native of Camberwell, first drew my attention to Lady A. Her ladyship used to speak to this child; they had met on the beach, and the child was proud of the acquaintanceship. It babbled unceas ingly of Lady A. I had never seen this personage, but her name, her name alone, delighted me. There was something romantic and mysterious in that reticent initial. It recalled fashionable fiction of the thirties, of that inflated period \ hen Lady A. and Lord B. and Lady N. strutted through inflated story books. For a whole fortnight I built castles around Lady A.; for a whole fortnight Lady A. shed a glamour over my existence, inflated it, so to speak. This Camberwell child prated of her without cease, and I was delighted to live within a stone’s throw of such mystery. At last—dire disillusion—my eyes were opened! The child was with me at the time, this child from Camberwell.”

“Go on,” said the Countess.

“I encountered Lady A.,” continued Merceron. “Her ladyship was a middle-aged woman with a wide leather rim to her skirt, and a big dog. This child and I were advancing together; we were quite close to the heroine of my romances, my one distraction amid so much that was ordinary. ‘ That is Lady A.,’ whispered the child, awestruck and tremulous. ‘ Hay, child, Hay! ’ exclaimed her ladyship. She had heard the whisper. Then turning to me, ‘ This little girl will persist in dropping her aitches,’ she said. But I had already turned my back on Lady Hay. The spell was broken; romance and mystery had vanished. She was no Lady A. at all, but a mere Hay I You may find them in any Peerage,” concluded Merceron.

The Countess was laughing.

“I’m afraid I ’m a fact equally substantial,” she said.

“But you do not masquerade under an initial.”

“You wear even less.”

The comic situation came home to Harvey. Laughing, he produced a card.

She read it curiously.

“I like the name,” she said; “only, I ’ll have to learn it by heart—and Harvey is nice.”

“Suggests a good circulation,” he remarked.

“You must tell me some more, though?”

“I was born three years earlier than yourself,” he answered, risking the accuracy of the statement.

“How do you know?”

“I’m nearly twenty-six.”

“But——and she was about to express her surprise at his correct divination. She caught the merriment in his eye, instead.

“That was very clever—a perfect trap,” she said.

“You have never even heard of the Mercerons?” asked Harvey.

She shook her head.

“We are a remarkable family.”

“I am not surprised.”

“ Of course not.”

“Came over with the Conqueror, I suppose— Merceron sounds like it?”

“Came over vid Dieppe and Newhaven, I believe; but the Mercerons are famous, nevertheless. You don’t happen to play the barrel-organ?” he asked.

“No—how silly 1”

He disregarded the epithet.

“The Mercerons are the only monopolists in this country,” said he.

“Is it a patent something?”

“No; but a monopoly all the same. My great-grandfather, you must know, was an organist—quite a musician in his way. His son too was musical, but preferred building organs to playing on them. There was more money in it. It was he who made the first barrel-organs in this country. They had always come from abroad, from Italy, before. Of course he could sell them cheaper, making them on the spot. And when my father succeeded him—evolution had already displaced the barrel-organ by the piano-organ — the Mercerons practically had the monopoly of the street-organ trade. Now I’m sole proprietor. I go down to the works once or twice a year and look at the books. It pays, but it’s a sad eminence all the same.”

“Why?” asked the Countess, greatly interested.

“Well, you see; every piano-organ in this country comes out of the Merceron works. My own position is therefore most awkward. For, not only do I connive at and profit by the misery of thousands of my fellow-creatures, but, whenever I myself am victim ised, whenever some miserable Italian halts outside my rooms and tortures me with my-—with his infernal machine — what am I to do! The portion is most delicate. I can’t send him away, for didn’t I sell him the instrument?”

The Countess laughed.

But Harvey continued:

“What can I do to such a man? Nothing. And I really cannot afford to wind up the firm over a simple matter of etiquette I”

“You are musical yourself?” asked the Countess.

Harvey hesitated.

“No—no, certainly not; only the cause of music in others.”

He had deflected the shaft.

Here a servant interrupted them, announcing “Captain Mills.” Was Lady Grasmere at home?

She looked across at Harvey.

“Yes,” she said.

As yet she had only known her companion tête-a-tête. She was curious to see how he would figure in a more complex arena.

CHAPTER XI
THEY OPEN WIDER.

" But the society named polite is volatile . . . ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is besides addicted in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of its rapidly revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their attention on the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from giddiness and preserve a notion of identity.”

George Meredith, An Essay on Comedy.

“CAPTAIN MILLS,” said Merceron, “you mistook me for Captain Mills last night?”

The Countess agreed.

“Shall I thank him; I owe him even more than Hutchinson?”

The door opened, and Merceron was introduced to a man of his own figure, handsome and sunburnt of face, whose neat moustache was trimmed with military precision.

“Awful weather!” said the new-comer, taking a chair.

“Perfectly horrid!” assented Lady Grasmere.

Merceron, though an authority, expressed no opinion.

“It’s clearing up, though,” said Captain Mills. “I heard you were at the Stoke ball— rather fun wearing masks—what were you in? I hunted for you everywhere, but couldn’t find you,” he continued, addressing the Countess.

“I was in yellow—it was very amusing,” she replied. “Mr. Merceron was in black, and had, I believe, some remarkable adventures,” she roguishly added.

“Really?” said the soldier, turning to Harvey.

Harvey however, was equal to the occasion.

“ The supper was excellent,” he returned, with edifying correctness.

“Going to Goodwood?” asked Captain Mills.

“I haven’t decided—I suppose I ought to. You are?” from Lady Grasmere.

“I’m going to the Bassets—he’s our Colonel, you know. Lady Basset usually asks half the regiment and all her nieces.”

“Dangerous, isn’t it?”

“There’s safety in numbers. You won’t be at Cowes?” asked the Captain.

“No, I think not.”

“You never are.”

Here the man interrupted them, announcing the Marchioness of Stoke and Lady May Draper.

“Shocking weather!” said the Marchioness, as the circle widened. Lady May drawled in sympathy, and Merceron at once recognised the pink domino whom he had so effectually routed the night before. The Marchioness, he already knew for his hostess.

“Shocking weather!” she repeated in a tone suggesting that she looked upon the behaviour of the elements as an offence directly aimed against her own person. “ Most unpleasant!”

“But it’s clearing, is it not?” replied Lady Grasmere. “Your dance was perfectly lovely, Marchioness; even Captain Mills says it was delightful, and he’s quite spoiled.”

The Marchioness, pausing in her inspection of Merceron, responded with a faded smile.

“I didn’t quite catch his name last night?” she said in a loud whisper to the Countess, who enlightened her. Lady Stoke repeated it. The name had a pleasant sound, but was unfamiliar.

Lady May, meanwhile, was telling the others how she had come across a terribly rude man the night before.

“I wish I knew who it was!” she concluded vindictively.

Merceron, however, rendered her no assistance.

The Marchioness was monopolising Lady Grasmere.

“When are you leaving town?” she was asking. “We’re staying till Goodwood: of course you ’ll be there?”

“I really haven’t quite decided; it’s such a long way off, you know,” came in reply.

“A fortnight, my dear Gertrude,—and everything’s being snapped up.”

The remainder of the party was deep in racing matters. Lady May had just asked Harvey whether he preferred Ascot to Good-wood, and he had startled his audience by confessing that he knew nothing of either, that he had only seen a fraction of a race in his lifetime, and that by sheer accident. He gave an account of this latter experience; how, as a small boy, he was once exploring Brighton Downs, when, in a deserted spot, he inadvertently stumbled across a group of mounted jockeys, who took to their heels at his approach. On reflection, it had occurred to him that he must have witnessed a “start.”

Lady May received this explanation with her customary Arctic smile. Captain Mills was greatly amused. They evidently mistook Merceron’s plain statement of fact for some peculiarly waggish piece of humour.

Here they were again interrupted by the man, who ushered in Lady Horace Waring.

A young and very pretty woman—Merceron distinctly remembered having seen photographs of her in shop windows,—perfectly dressed, smart as a new pin, joined them.

“Dreadful weather; but it’s clearing up,” she said, advancing towards Lady Grasmere. “Marchioness, everybody’s raving about your dance—so original, you know!—such fun being masked and flirting with one’s own husband. Mine kissed me, the wretch 1 Wonder who he thought I was? ”

“Rather poor fun, kissing a mask,” suggested Harvey.

“There now—he’s quite spoilt it!” exclaimed Lady Hprace.

She was one of the most amusing women in Society, and her veracity, though frequently questioned, was rarely improved upon. She was the first, however, to laugh at her own undoing, and the others quickly followed suit.

“Who is he, Gertrude?” she asked of Lady Grasmere.

The Countess told her.

“One of the Hertfordshire Mercerons?” she enquired.

“The Hertfordshire Merceron,” said Harvey.

“Girls hunt, don’t they—your sisters?”

“Yes.”

“Pretty girls—don’t want much of a lead either,” said Lady Horace approvingly; then, volatile as before, in that rather shrill voice of hers, “See you all at Goodwood, I suppose? We’re full up or else some of you would have to come to ours.”

Everybody had made definite arrangements save Lady Grasmere and Harvey.

Lady Horace was pained.

“You must come to us, dear—do!” she pleaded; “and Mr. Merceron must come as well—men are always so useful, are they not?” she asked, mischievously confusing Captain Mills with the awkward question.

“They do their best,” said he.

“Aren’t they ornamental as well?” asked Harvey.

“Only in fancy dress,” declared Lady Horace, “and then—

She hesitated.

“And then?” pressed Captain Mills.

“And then it’s their legs,” she whispered.

The Marchioness coughed and mentioned Cowes.

“Calves!” corrected Lady Horace in an audible aside.

“We’ve taken a house for the week,” continued the Marchioness, disregarding the interruption.

“Is Gertrude coming?” enquired Lady May.

But the Countess had to decline. She was going to Canterbury for the cricket week instead.

“You know, I’ve a place in Kent,” she explained; “it’s a matter of duty. The county will cut me if I don’t entertain; we always have done.”

The Marchioness was sorry. She and Lady May rose to leave.

“We ’re going to the Opera to-night, and it begins so early—that wretched Wagner!” said the former.

“What are they giving?” asked Captain Mills.

“Siegfried; and it starts at half-past seven, and the Marquis will insist on being punctual. He won’t dine either, but just has a cup of tea first, and then he eats sandwiches between the acts. He says he can’t listen properly if he dines,” answered the Marchioness; “ only think of it—with those wretched society papers, too!”

Lady Horace comforted her.

“Siegfried is rather fun, though; everybody dresses just like the men in the Prehistoric Peeps,” she said, alluding to a well-known series of Punch drawings. “And then there’s a dragon that sings bass and pretends to get killed, and a bear and a bird—quite a pantomime. But the music’s lovely: Sir Horace heard it the other day, and he came home gushing—gushing like the rock that Moses struck!”

Lady May and her mamma took their departure.

“Rather a stick, that girl,” said Captain Mills, as the door closed.

“Pots o’ money,” said Lady Horace.

“Suppose that’s why she puts on the side.”

A mischievous light gleamed in Lady Grasmere’s eye as she turned to Harvey, and asked:

“How did you find her—you were dancing with her last night?”

Merceron narrated his experience with the pink domino, omitting no detail of their duologue.

“Made her regularly furious, I should think; serve her right,” said’ Lady Horace warmly.

“No wonder she doesn’t marry—with those manners!”

Captain Mills too was delighted.

“You should have passed her on to me,” he said; “do her good, a snubbing o’ sorts like that—wonder she didn’t find you out just now!”

“Far too silly,” said Lady Horace. “Gertrude, I really must go—see you at the Faucits’ to-night? And do bring Mrs. Hodgson; I’ve quite missed her this afternoon.” She gave Harvey a hand. “You’re coining for Goodwood, aren’t you?” she said. “And you must come and dine first, and say ‘ How-de-do? ’ to Sir Horace—mind he does,” as she turned again to Lady Grasmere. “Nice boy that!” she whispered; “I’m quite hit. Good-bye, dearl” and she was off.

Captain Mills left shortly afterwards.

“What do you think of us?” asked Lady Grasmere, when she and Harvey were once more alone.

“Rather fun, wasn’t it?” he replied.

She was proud of him.

“ You really did splendidly,” she said. “You’ve made quite a conquest of Lady Horace. She doesn’t ask everybody to her parties, although one might think she did! Seems to know your people, doesn’t she?”

“The girls,” said Ilarvey.

A silence followed. Merceron leaned back, happy. He had forgotten all about the dismal minutes he had spent in the rain, looking out over the dreary Serpentine and leaden sky.

The Countess glanced at the clock.

“Mr. Merceron,” she interposed, “will yon go home now?”

Harvey’s face fell. She smiled it back to a more gracious oval.

“Go home and dress,” she continued; “and, if you are very good, you may come back and dine—or take me out. We’d better go out, I want some fresh air; and it’s left off raining, hasn’t it?”

Merceron looked out of the window.

“It’s quite bright,” he said.

“Don’t be long!” and she accompanied him to the head of the staircase and waved a hand as he disappeared.

At his rooms Merceron found a letter from Hutchinson.

“Dear Harvey,” began that youthful mariner, •—“Do wr’te and tell me what happened after I left? I shall be at Devonport till Saturday. Did they give you the boot, or did you leave unassisted? I would have looked in this morning to find out, only I had to hurry like steam. Write by return, there’s a good chap, and relieve the strain. I’d give a fiver to know what happened.

“Yours ever,
C. H. Hutchinson

A lengthy postscript was, however, the most interesting feature of this document.

“By-the-by,” Hutchinson had added, “Phipps, a brother-officer, was at your rooms last night. He was up in town on leave as well, and he hunted me down to my aunt’s, and she sent him on to your place. He waited a bit; but, as we didn’t turn up, he left. I’m sorry we missed him. He s an awfully good sort, and ou’d have liked him, because he’s musical and all that sort of thing.”

“Is he?” commented Harvey, “perhaps that accounts for his helping himself to Isabella! ”

He thought the possibilities of this solution over for a moment, then:

“Hang it all! I'm keeping a lady waiting!” he exclaimed, forcibly dismissing thae subject and ringing up his man.

CHAPTER XII
ARRIVED.

FOR the present, Merceron had dismissed Hutchinson’s message and the light it seemed to throw upon his mysterious visitor of the night before, upon the unexplained disappearance of the score and libretto of his opera, Isabella, and the damage done to the violated cabinet. He was dressing with all possible haste, yet not too speedily to admit of the immaculate, spoiling two bows and a collar before criticism was satisfied and he at liberty to proceed. Hancock, his man, assisted, blazing with surprise and suppressed joyful-ness, scenting perquisites tenfolded. What ailed his master?

“It’s them women,” said he, when all was over. “That there Hutchinson looks a bad lot!” Harvey’s appearance was really worthy of the locality as he sauntered forth into Piccadilly and hailed a passing cab. Even the driver of the hansom, an expert and difficult, felt fully satified as to his fare’s distinction.

Before returning to Albert Gate, Merceron looked in at his club and took down Debrett, first making sure that Carter-Page was nowhere in the vicinity.

“It may be foolish, but it saves trouble,” said Harvey, as he turned up “Grasmere.”

He discovered that the Countess was widow to the seventh Earl, who had died three years ago and eighteen months after marriage, without issue and aged sixty-two; that the present holder of the title was a nephew, a boy of sixteen. Harvey also searched for and found Sir Horace Waring, evidently one of two brothers, both baronets. He then rejoined his hansom and called at a florist’s, arriving at the house with a carefully-selected buttonhole in his coat and a big handful of roses for Lady Grasmere.

The Countess was not quite ready, and for some minutes Harvey had to twirl his thumbs in an unfamiliar drawing-room; a new apartment this, hung with exquisite water-colour drawings—Fred Walkers, Pinwells, Gregorys and Smythes,—which he fitfully examined till his hostess welcomed him, superb and dazzling in creamy satin and diamonds.

“I’ve left a note for Mrs. Hodgson; we ’re deserting her this evening,” she said, smiling. “We are dining in town—where?”

Harvey suggested the place on the Embankment, beloved of Hutchinson, and the Countess acquiesced. Outside, the horses waited, impatient for exercise.

The rain had long since ceased, and now the sky was clear—a blue new-washed, though bordered by heavy banks of cloud that smouldered a dun orange where the sun was sinking. They drove down Piccadilly in the open carriage, side by side, with London, crowded and astir, swarming to right and to left of them, enclosing them with a changing wall of flesh and blood. Merceron had found his starting-point at last, had indeed begun to share that brilliant Life of which but yesterday he had stood a fevered spectator. He leaned back for a moment with lowered eyelids, so as the better to drink in the melody of it all, so as the better to feel the rousing embrace of this sea whose dancing waters he was cleaving —on and onward. With the evening his former exultation had returned. At this festive hour illusion and fancy came closer, played their parts with fuller voice and eyes more doquent, warmed by the uncertain light, the oncoming dusk.

Their dinner was rather ideal than real. In the place of Hutchinson sat this woman whose every word was quick and tingling, aglow with music; whose person was composed of so subtle a compounding of flesh and spirit as to have escaped the material. Merceron, radiant, lived with every nerve— and, womanlike, she reflected his ecstasy, joyed with him in all the fulness of this new existence.

“When were you born?” she had asked, wondering at his delight, “and where?”

“In Piccadilly, last night, when we met.”

“I’ve half a mind to believe you,” she replied; “but what happened before?”

“There was no before.”

“You have told me nothing of that,” she urged.

“Like Minerva, I sprang fully armed out of the brow of Jove!” he laughed back, “and before—”

“ You made his august head ache?”

“Rather, my own.”

“You worked?”

“Pursued a phantom, had ambitions, and now,” he lingered on her eyes, “it is all changed,” he finished slowly.

“What were you doing?” she persisted.

“Mistaking a duckpond for the ocean, a backwater for the river!”

“Backwaters are nice,” mused her ladyship; “one is undisturbed, and there is usually shade and cushions.”

“I was undisturbed and there were cushions—but I was alone.”

“So are most of us,” she sighed.

“There were no problems,” he returned, “only work—and such empty work! And I growing old all the time, without ever havihg known you 1”

She could not doubt his sincerity as his words flashed across—its sheer strength was drawing her to his side. She felt her weakness, and her head fought with her heart.

“You would make an ardent lover,” she lightly replied; “I shall have to introduce you to some nice girls.”

“After knowing you!” he retorted.

“I said ‘nice girls,’” answered the Countess.

“Lady Mays?” he asked glibly; and they both laughed.

“You are killing 1” she interspersed.

“Rather, the victim.”

“Poor boy—only a day old, and you dare attack!”

“You are mocking my inexperience?”

She nodded. “In self-defence—in self-defence I” said her head to her heart.

“You mistake me,” he continued: “is not every face an open book to those who read?— and I have lived in London!”

'* Theory—bald theory!” she returned.

“The theorist is at least disinterested!”

“But uninteresting,” she drawled back: “he lacks the very weakness that makes experience strong.”

“Humanity?” asked Merceron. “I am human?”

She did not answer, and Merceron was left facing a blank wall—the position of the theorist. He said so.

“I am on the other side,” she tossed back.

“I am climbing.”

“I am years ahead—you cannot even see me,” she crowed.

“Inspiration has placed me at your side!”

She shook her head dubiously. “Wait—I am out of breath.” Then again, “Wait! this time to herself; for her heart beat rapidly, and she knew its tenor. Some of the roses that he had brought were in her corsage. She hid her face in them.

Merceron ordered coffee.

“Would you like to hear an act or two of Siegfried?” she asked, as he lit a cigarette. “I have a box, you know.”

“It would be rather jolly.”

The carriage had waited, and was dismissed at Covent Garden with orders for a later hour; and again Merceron found himself an integral part of what last night had been but panoramic.

Mrs. Hodgson rose as they entered the box, and the Countess sat down between her and Harvey.

The dragon was in its death throes when they arrived, a most plaintive worm. They laughed at it. But their chatter ceased when the note of the Waldvogel smote their hearts with its ethereal sweetness. Visitors broke the spell that had crept over them. The lights were raised, before them the curtain. In the tier below and opposite they could see the Marchioness of Stoke and Lady May. The Marquis was eating sandwiches, with the score open in front of him. Merceron admired his enthusiasm.

“Shall we stay for the end?” asked Lady Grasmere as the conductor stepped into his place for the third act.

Harvey was more than willing. “Listening is the wiser part,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. Some fugitive thread of his old ambitions had tugged at his heart, and he had broken this last strand.

The performance was over at last. Brunnhilde had surrendered, had relinquished her divinity for terrestrial love. The eyes in the box met with more than common understanding.

“Brave old world!” said Lady Grasmere, “I’d sooner be there than in the Royal box!”

“You are not afraid of dragons?” asked Merceren, smiling into the lovely face.

“Isnot the Marchioness below?” she asked; and Mrs. Hodgson laughed reproval.

“I had forgotten,” said Harvey. “And yet the present has its moments,” he added, bending over her with opera-cloak in hands that testified.

Together they went out into the vestibule where Hutchinson and he had stood the night before. Now he was looking for Lady Grasmere’s man. The world had undergone considerable change during the intervening hours—belonged to him at last, as he to it. He was no longer a spectator, a sightseer, nc longer aloof; he had thrown in his stake with the rest, and the game prospered.

He put the ladies into their carriage.

“I am going on to Gaunt House and the Faucits,” said the Countess; “it will be dull, so I’m not going to take you—good-night!”

“Till to-morrow,” said he.

She was off—a wave of a dainty hand, and he was alone.

Merceron walked home that night. The new life was greater than its promise.

BOOK II.
WITHIN

CHAPTER I
TRANSITION.

THE summer had gone by, autumn had merged into winter, and now some faint signs of returning foliage showed on tree and hedge as Harvey Merceron progressed homewards from Dover. Eight months had elapsed since last we saw him, handing the Countess of Grasmere and Mrs. Hodgson into their carriage after the curtain had fallen upon the third act of Siegfried. Eight months had passed since that eventful morning whereon Harvey Merceron had put Art aside, resolved to play no more for the dancers but himself to dance—he who ‘ had ten times more music in him than all the other dancers together! ’

It is doubtful whether either Sopwith or even Hutchinson would, at a first glance, have recognised in the young gentleman of fashion who had just landed at the Admiralty Pier the Harvey Merceron of a year ago; as, perfectly dressed, he chose a first-class carriage and a cigar as though the whole business of his life had consisted in similar selections. The musician had disappeared in the man of leisure, and only the too thoughtful eyes, set somewhat incongruously amid more placid features, betokened the youthful enthusiast who, for three long, arduous years, had grappled doggedly with the composition of Isabella— now, alas, an episode almost unsubstantial, ol such stuff as those fugitive incidents of child-hood that we turn back to and smile upon in warm moments of reminiscence. Isabella, her making and her sensational exit, were alike relegated to this same shadowy background.

Merceron, true to his resolve, had conquered all impulse of curiosity, of ownership, had dropped fhe clue which Hutchinson had placed within his hands. The affair of Isabella’s disappearance was no longer his. He was no musician, therefore he had composed no opera, therefore no opera of his could have been stolen. That Isabella had passed out of his life—were she burnt or the white elephant of an unknown thief, it mattered little which— had been the one consideration., . . And now eight months had closed upon her, had passed, lightning-like, varied, in an increasing succession of new scenes, new faces, and new experiences; more filled with the Life for which he had thirsted than all foregoing years.

The old quiet of his aloofness in Down Street, with Sopwith for sole distraction, music as sole topic, had ceased. Of Down Street he it had caught but fugitive glimpses, of Sopwith he had heard nothing save that his opera was making progress. He had had no time for further contact with his old surroundings; indeed he hardly wished for more than this. His life had been full, full to overflowing, as things were. A breathless fortnight in London had succeeded upon the masked ball and its ensuing presentations. An easy-going swarm of butterflies, who demanded of man nothing more than that he should be well-dressed, cleanly, and fitly introduced, of agreeable aspect and bearing, had welcomed friend Merceron to common flights.

The London season over, there had followed the Warings’ Goodwood party; a full house and an excited crowd all intent on winners. By day, the Downs, a gay mob picnicing in the open, blazing sunshine and deep blue skies, the hubbub of the ring, interrupted by the mad rush, the break-neck scramble of straining horseflesh; by night, the same company discussing the day’s hazards, the flower-like toilettes of the women as they dined under the shaded candles, a stroll in the grounds, now with a brother cigar, genia' with perfect health and unimpaired digestive organs, or else Lady Grasmere, the hand on his arm more eloquent than speech, to the accompaniment of song and music from open drawing-room windows.

Only once had the Countess appeared contrite, questioned the impulse which had led her to launch her companion upon this blissful sea.

“ You have never told me what you think of me for it all,” she had asked, almost shamefacedly, “of my behaviour?”

“ I have left off thinking,” Harvey had decisively replied, “and my actions are trans- parent,”—with a gentle pressure of his arm upon her hand.

“You should despise me, should you not? ’ she had questioned, smiling.

“Myself—if anybody? ”

“ A very Christian view”

“ But I am proud—er, devilish proud!”

She dropped him a curtsey upon the spot.

From Goodwood, Harvey had gone on to Lady Grasmere’s place in Kent, to join in the robuster pleasures of the Canterbury week. Here was another houseful of visitors: and the days sped fast in the cricket field, where the whole county had assembled to encourage its champions; dispensing bounteous hospitality from gaily decorated tents, and turning out of nights for a full succession of concerts, dances, and theatricals.

He had gone abroad after these festivities, to Ostend, up the Rhine, gradually drifting to Nuremberg on his way to Bayreuth, where he had promised to join the Countess and Sir Horace and Lady Waring. The Marquis of Stoke was also of their party. He was to meet Lady May and the Marchioness later on, at Venice. They were yachting in the Mediterranean; and, meanwhile, the Marquis was free to pursue his beloved Wagner without fear of disorganising the family dining arrangements, and with no special necessity for munching ham sandwiches between the acts.

It was Lady Grasmere who had drawn Merceron to Bayreuth—his second visit, by-the-by. Both she and Lady Horace were more than ordinarily devoted to music, displayed even a technical understanding of harmony and orchestration that caused Harvey considerable surprise. More often than not they sat beside him in the long intervals between act and act, discussing an open score and following with apparent ease intricate combinations, subtle manipulations of themes and counter themes. Harvey surmised a deal of unsuspected earnestness behind such facility.

He, for his part, was content to listen, attempted neither analysis nor synthesis, tabooed even that perpetual and ubiquitous tri-syllable—Leit-motif.

Once, indeed, he had been surprised into helping the ladies over a peculiarly difficult passage, a jumble of apparently discordant discords which even the Marquis could not adequately interpret.

“I didn’t think you knew so much about it,” said Lady Horace, when Harvey finished. The Countess was silently astonished; even his careless disclaimer hardly contented her.

“Oh, a musical fellow told me,” he had replied. Nor was the response altogether fiction, albeit the “musical fellow” was none other than his own discarded self.

Not even to Lady Grasmere had he spoken of his old ambitions. His school and Oxford she knew about, also that his mother and sisters lived in a biggish house in Hertfordshire, and that they were spending the summer in Switzerland. He had also spoken of Sopwith, but not as of a fellow, one with whom he had shared a common pursuit, a common art; merely as a musical friend who was working upon an .opera dealing with Francesca of Rimini.

The Countess knew some of his songs. “Feeble—very feeble,” was her description of them.

“Pot-boilers, I believe,” said Harvey; “ but the opera’s serious. I suggested Francesca; it’s rather a good subject, don’t you think so?”

The Countess agreed, after which both Sopwith and his doings were laid aside in favour of matters more personal and pressing.

From Bayreuth the party had descended into the Tyrol, had separated there to meet once more upon the Warings’ grouse-moor. Harvey went up to Scotland with the rest, and, at the close of his visit, recrossed the Channel, Italy his new destination. There he again encountered the Marquis, this time accompanied by Lady Stoke and their daughter, also a dozen other of his new acquaintances, bent on escaping the rigours of the frozen North.

The Marquis gave Harvey an unexpectedly warm welcome, had evidently taken a great liking to him during their week at Bayreuth, and was doubtless glad to have captured someone capable of sharing in the musical speculations which he was constantly formulating, asserting with all the assurance and dogmatism of the amateur. He was, as Harvey soon discovered, an amiable bore, with lofty ideals, whose expression, however, he left to poorer men.

Merceron was not ill-pleased at this meeting and its entailments; for the Marchioness could be very gracious, knew, besides, all the best people, and even Lady May, following in the wake of her father, had grown quite respectful. It was on the Stoke yacht that Harvey made the voyage from .Naples to Alexandria; arriving in Cairo just in time to spend Christmas with Lady Grasmere, her nephew, the present Earl, and Lady Mountjoy, his mother.

These months sped rapidly enough, a constant flight of novel experience and emotion, insight, action and reaction, amid changing soil, faces, races, and scenery; a movement so sustained, varied, coloured, material and abstract, that Merceron was left no opportunity for weariness—nor overlong meditations either. The child within him, the instinct that had first prompted him to intrude at Stoke House, that had so disarmed the Countess and then irresistibly attracted her, this joyous ingenuousness of his remained almost intact, winning for him even more friends than his evident means and handsome presence. Women were especially delighted with him; he had individuality and that without aggressive advertisement., Several of them said as much, with more to follow; but Lady Grasmere apart, Harvey was in no mood to seek alliances.

Towards the Countess, he was ever the same devoted cavalier; although the ardour of his first attack had abated with a conviction of the security of his position, a recognition of the wisdom of her parryings. She was evidently widow enough to foresee the danger of such breathless carryings by assault. Now he was steadily gaining her confidence as well as her love, a quieter process, yet one recommended by all praise-worthy counsel.

“You are not fit to be trusted out alone,” she had once laughingly declared. “Lady Horace, please take him away—he is turning my head.” This, during the first week of their friendship.

Lady Horace had played lightning-conductor with some success; and Merceron, gathering the “ true word” behind the jest, had henceforth resolved to move by the measure of their surroundings. So that at Bayreuth, in Scotland, and later in Egypt and at Cannes, a softer mood had prevailed, and one more in unison with the tempo of the rest of life.

From the Riviera Merceron had gone to Paris, and the Countess home to her house in Kent. Now Harvey too was on English soil; a week with his people in Hertfordshire, and he would join a party that Lady Grasmere was entertaining over Easter.

CHAPTER II
POSTMEN.

T'HE Countess and Lady Horace were at the station when Harvey arrived from Charing Cross, and the three walked over to the house together, leaving Hancock to look after the baggage.

“There’s not much peace now; and we used to be that quiet!” said Hancock to the man who had driven over to assist him, after sundry-courteous inquiries anent the health and wellbeing of various members of the Grasmere household.

“A little society does one good; and changes is always welcome,” returned the other, cheerfully. “ You ’re not a rover, Mr. Hancock?”

“‘ There’s no place like home ’ is my motto; and I stick to it,” was Hancock’s emphatic answer.

“Well, you’ll be treated first-class down here; and though I says it as shouldn’t, we’re a most sociable lot,” modestly observed the other.

“Never met a more sociable,” Hancock politely responded. “When I was here last summer, I said to the cook, I said, ‘ I’ve a good mind to stay here, a very good mind ’; and she says, ‘ Go along, Mr. Hancock, I’m a married woman I ’” Here Harvey’s retainer indulged in a little dignified laughter.

“Cooks is independent,” said the other, meditatively; “they earns good wages.”

“‘ But you may stay here all the same,’ was what she said as well,” resumed Hancock.

“Think it likely?” asked the other.

“You’re on the spot,” returned Hancock, evasively.

“Well, they do say it ’ll either be him or Captin Mills.”

Here the conversation assumed a character so confidential as to merit a privacy which we hasten to respect.

The party that Lady Grasmere was entertaining over Easter was, relatively speaking, a very quiet one; just a few friends whom she had gathered together until the London season should rejoin them all in town. The Warings were there of course; for, as Merceron had long since discovered, Lady Horace and his hostess were friends of more than common devotion.

“Di Waring’s one of the few women I’d sooner talk to than a man,” the latter had once confided to Harvey; “her notions are masculine, her conclusions feminine, and her prejudices neuter.”

“The ideal woman?” enquired Harvey.

“The ideal woman’s woman,” replied Lady Grasmere.

Now the trio was strolling down the white road that led to the lodge gates.

“The Marquis and Lady May are here, but you mustn’t ask after the Marchioness,” Lady Grasmere was explaining; “she’s staying with her sister, and the sister and the old gentleman don’t speak. One of them jilted the other forty years ago—I don’t know which one.”

“The Marquis, of course,” interrupted Lady Horace; “do you think a woman would sulk for half a century! Just imagine, years and years before we were born these two people,”—she continued, romancing; “they ought to be put in the British Museum—under glass!”

“Lady May says that you were awfully nice in Italy, but that you scorned Guido and Carlo Dolci,” said the Countess; “you shouldn’t have done that.”

“Her pets, and ‘ so sweet! ’” mimicked Lady Horace.

“Couldn’t help it after Bayreuth and this person,” said Merceron. “I left Lady Horace without an illusion,” he declared, laughing.

“Rude man, isn’t he?” demanded the baronet’s wife.

Captain Mills was on the lawn, amusing himself with a golf club and an imaginary ball. Sir Horace and Lady May were examining a book of artificial flies; and, indoors, the Marquis was deep in the Times.

“Your friend Sopwith’s opera, Francesca oj Rimini, is going to be put on this season—a British composer at last!” said the Marquis as he shook Harvey’s hand.

“Is it? I must write and congratulate him— haven’t seen Sopwith for months; he’s been pretty quick though, he had only just begun it when I last saw him.”

“We ’ll all have to go and cheer,” proposed Lady Grasmere.

“Rather!” from Merceron; and he went to the library and wrote Sopwith a congratulatory note forthwith, promising him an early visit, and apologising for having done so little to maintain their friendship. “But I’ve cut music, as you know,” he concluded; and continuing, “I shall see you on the first night, if not before. I suppose you must be terribly busy.”

Later on, at dinner, the conversation again drifted towards Sopwith’s opera. Captain Mills had met the composer.

“A long-haired chap with glasses, isn’t he?”the soldier asked of Merceron.

“He wasn’t when I last saw him, but Sopwith’s capable of much,” replied Harvey, smiling as he pictured this new composer’s evident concessions to the situation.

“Do you think he let it grow on purpose?” asked Lady Horace.

“Imagine a musician without long hair! ’ exclaimed Lady Grasmere, “nobody would believe in him—an English name is bad enough!”

“Supposing Mr. Merceron were to write an opera, do you think he’d let his hair grow?” demanded Lady Horace, with more mischief, perhaps, than she had intended, “or Captain Mills?”

“ I should think letting one’s hair grow is quite sufficient occupation, without throwing in an opera,” returned Harvey unruffled.

“I think the hair’s about as far as I’d get,” drawled Captain Mills.

“Your friend Mr. Sopwith would probably enjoy this discussion. He’d doubtless feel amply repaid for I don’t know how many months’ hard labour!” commented Lady Grasmere, severely sarcastic.

“You young people have not the respect for Art that was common in my time—it’s these Americans!” observed the Marquis. He had a comfortable practice of holding “these Americans” responsible for every current irreverence.

Merceron’s flippancies on this occasion did not, however, affect the old gentleman’s estimate of his abilities, for, only the next morning, the Marquis reiterated an interest in their proper employment.

“You should go into Parliament,” he said to Harvey, as they chatted after breakfast; “a young man of your gifts is wasted, sir, positively wasted, unless he settles down to responsible duties.”

Instead of Parliament, however, Merceron went off to a neighbouring trout-stream with the Warings, and spent the greater part of an afternoon with Lady May, looking out quotations for some competition formulated by that damsel’s favourite organ, The British Matron.

Very peaceful were these few days, their restfulness doubly enhanced by the intimacy of the little band. Of Lady Grasmere’s society, Harvey had more than his fair share. She was an even more attractive woman in this quiet country home of hers than in the more fashionable localities they had frequented. In the white blouses and skirts, faultlessly cut, that she wore in the daytime, she would walk lightly at his side, humanising the landscape. The easy grace which marked her out-door movements reminded him frequently of Diana. More regal, yet equally simple, were her evening gowns. Lady Horace’s admiration of her was outspoken, even audacious.

“ I know you’re as much in love with her as I am,” she said one evening to Harvey.

“More,” he replied.

“And you are content? ’

“Quite.”

“I envy you your wisdom—even though it’s unwise.”

“She might marry?”he asked, half-interested.

“ She will marry,” asserted Lady Horace.

“I hope so,” he soothingly returned.

“Wretch!” said Lady Horace, laughing at him. “You’ve never told me where you went to school,” she added, rallying; “I want to send my boy there. Woman must have been part of the curriculum—a subject so necessary, yet they never teach it!”

“It is a gift,” Harvey gravely explained; “the connoisseur is born and not made— nascitur non fit:

‘For ‘iie poet was man and woman and child,’ as Bret Harte used to say,” he somewhat irrelevantly added.

Lady Horace shook her head.

“You ’re in the depths,” she said, “and I am getting out of mine.”

“You should learn to swim, now there’s that trout-stream,” he smilingly suggested.

“Girls, nowadays, must have a hard time talking to you men?” she questioned.

“I have never met any.”

She left him unregenerate, and rejoined Sir Horace.

Harvey contemplated the couple from his chair.

“That woman will make me think, if I only let her,” he reflected. “ I shall have to drag Mills in and make him bring his concertina”— alluding to one of the Captain’s most popular accomplishments.

Lady May was seated amid a group of poets, seeking more quotations.

“I wish you’d find some for me?” she said as Harvey went by; “I’ve gone through five things of Byron to-day and only found eight.”

“Poor Byron!” exclaimed Harvey.

“Poor me,” corrected Lady May.

Captain Mills and the Marquis were playing billiards, and Lady Grasmere was marking the game.

“Come to relieve me?” she asked as Harvey entered.

He took her place and later on a cue, and then he and Captain Mills talked India till bedtime.

Lady Grasmere was scribbling notes when they returned to the drawing-room. The others had all retired. The soldier said “ Goodnight,” and Harvey sat down in a chair and watched the Countess as she wrote.

The thoughtful face and ruddy hair, illumined by the candles at her side, made a delicious picture.

At last she had finished.

“I rather wanted these to go to-night,” she said, biting her quill, “and the servants have all gone to bed.”

“Shall I do postman and run down to the village with them?” asked Harvey.

Outside, the sky was clear, the air fresh with the health of springtime. She had opened the French windows.

“I’ll come too,” she said. “You’re not afraid of the churchyard?”

She found a hat and a cape in the hall, and they started off together across the lawn.

CHAPTER III
LIFE, AND DEATH.

THE walk from the house to the post office was barely a matter of ten minutes. When Lady Grasmere and Harvey came out at the lodge gates they had only a few hundred yards of roadway to traverse before they reached the footpath that led across the rectory-field to the churchyard; another hundred yards or so, and they would pass the pond that marked the near end of the village street.

It was close on midnight when they set out. The Countess had taken Harvey’s arm, ahead ran the dim roadway, and the darkness closed in on them as they trod, cutting them off the more and more from the consciousness of a gregarious world.

Never before had Lady Grasmere seemed so near to Merceron as on this night. They had often been together at a similar hour: in Cairo, under the heavy stars; at Cannes, watching the moonlight tremble on the idle waves. But these Southern nights held none of the intimacy of the present excursion. They had been too exotic—were almost part of a routine, like the table d’hôte and the after-dinner band; they lacked all familiar appeal, were rather a spectacle than an atmosphere. To-night, this darkness of an English springtide was Merceron’s own and hers; no foreign savour distracted them with a heaven and an earth, so multiplied by art and convention as to partake of the theatric.

As they stepped along the world seemed to have dwindled to some desert island where only they two stirred, a personal belonging; every clod of soil, every fold of the darkness, their very own. Thought made an epic of each minute, so close were they, so eloquent the night! The silent stars and the mysterious distances unshrouded nocturnes rarer than any known of musician.

Through Harvey’s heart these melodies whispered and melted, equally elusive, equally vague, deep as the night.

The dun outline of a horse showed, black on black, as they struck across the footpath through the rectory-field; the vicarage was in darkness. Around them they could hear the persistent munch of browsing sheep.

The churchyard was heavily silent, the shadowy building in its centre singularly impressive. As they entered at the little swing-gate Harvey felt the arm within his own tighten. He returned the pressure, and they passed down this place of modest sepulture without word, heart and brain the busier for uninterruption.

“You were thinking of Gray and the Elegy?” she whispered as they skirted the pond.

“Yes—and you?”

“Of course.”

But a single light burned in the sleeping village, illuminating a low window in the upstairs room of a cottage.

“Poor Tom Martin! Doctor Small says he’s dying—and his mother’s such a dear. The boy’s all she has, too,” said Lady Grasmere as they passed.

Harvey’s thoughts went back to the churchyard .

They reached the post office, and he dropped the letters into the box. The object of their adventure was accomplished.

They turned, walking more slowly than before.

The letters were forgotten, and thought, fully freed, now centered entirely on the personal. The village clock began to strike the hour as they reached the churchyard. Harvey’s hand was on the gate. He paused and waited, his eyes on her face, white in that darkness, the spirit looking out on him, paling the night. Twelve! The hour had passed.

“Ghosts!” she whispered, with a nervous little laugh.

His arm went round her.

“No, darling—not yet!”

It was, indeed, no ghostly arm that encircled her, no illusive shape that was encircled.

“ I love you—I have always loved you,” he breathed.

“And I—” Her voice was glorious with perfect happiness.

Through the dark his eyes called to her. She raised her lips to his.

“My queen . . . My queen!”—his kisses covered her face—“you love me—you. love me!” Half in triumph, half questioning, his words came to her.

“I dare not say—how much,” she had answered.

Her height was near to his, her upturned face but just below his own. Time swooned as he held her in his arms, breast to breast, the perfume of her hair invading him.

The half-hour chimed on the night. The dead generations below the sod had known no love as this, the barred church no such union. The village slept, wrapped in a stubborn torpor, man beside wife, parent and child. Only the one light burned, in the cottage window where Love and Death were watching. And here in the churchyard stood Love and Life.

The hour struck, a single note that spoke to them of countless hours, a forerunner—so young is Love! A drop in an ocean was this hour, a blade of grass, a grain of sand; and they were treading summer meadows, golden shores!

Tears stirred through Merceron’s heart. In that hour he first tasted of the fruit of the tree of Perfect Knowledge, attained to the Open Secret—and Earth held no further veil. The Past, with its near horizons, incomplete emotions, had dwindled, then vanished, in this newer light. At first the old selves had obtruded, had dared dispute the Present—to be found wanting, turned utterly adrift. The Present was built to a larger scale! And amid this débris, this crackling of discarded works, Isabella had once more reappeared, this opera that his unformed manhood had wrought out of its inexperience ; a tattered thing, abortive, and piteous in its strained assumption of maturity, Its laboured mewlings, its flagrant shallownesses, now smote him—him who knew. The woman in bis arms, the heart that swelled to hers, knew love; and love was a fuller, a deeper melody . . . Poor Isabella! Poor everything! All, all was poor beside such wealth!

Another half-hour chimed. The dead underfoot had not stirred, nor shaken their worn bones—an antic chorus.

The village was dumb; only its dogs bayed aimlessly at nothings, or a challenging circle of cockerels crowed from farmyard to farmyard. The light behind the one yellow window-pane had vanished. Perhaps Life had surrendered the dying man, had cast its eye over this still churchyard, sure of succession; while Love sobbed through the dark.

“Home, darling—we must go home,” they whispered at last.

Their path was strewn with kisses; the April air was warm as the breath of June.

The lodge gates were reached, and they passed down the avenue and on to the lawn. The low lights of the drawing-room glowed soft. They entered and closed the French windows with hands caressing hands.

“Good-night,” he said. She was once more in his arms.

“Good-night,” she whispered; then, holding him from her, so as the better to see the loved face. “This was the ninth of April.”

“I shall always remember.”

“It will be my next birthday—and the next.”

Her hands fell, and he took them both and covered them with kisses.

“Good-night—good-night,” he said.

These words, so fervently repeated, were love-vows. They followed him to his room as he left her.

The whole world whispered, “Good-night!”

CHAPTER IV
A LITTLE MUSIC.

HARVEY and Lady Grasmere were left standing alone on the station platform, and Lady Horace was beaming down on them from a window of the moving train.

The Countess fluttered a handkerchief.

“I’ve been very good, have I not?” she asked. “We’ve both been very good; and yet Di Waring was personal, even made me blush.”

“Lady Horace is a villain,” returned Harvey with severity.

The train disappeared round a curve in the line, and Merceron and the Countess turned. The other guests had left in the morning, and Harvey was to take the last train, the 9.46. Mrs. Hodgson would arrive on the following day, for a lengthy visit, here and in London.

“Nearly six hours to mine,” said Harvey, as they quitted the station; “I shan’t stay in town ; I shall go on to my people’s from here —it will kill the days.”

“And tell them?” She smiled up at him as she spoke. Her smile had grown marvellously tender since that night. No wonder that Lady Horace had noticed the change.

“About what?” he teased.

“About—the designing widow-lady?” Almost her first direct reference was this to things anterior, to her marriage; and Harvey had of course never broached the subject. He knew that she had been but eighteen on her wedding-day and that she was widow at twenty. Lady Horace had supplied the rest, however: “The Earl was a father to her,” she had once told him, “a dear old gentleman—we were all so sorry. Her mother made the match—an old flame of hers, I fancy,—and Gertrude went to church from the schoolroom.”

“About the designing widow-lady and the defenceless orphan?” Harvey had just replied.

The village looked on at them as they passed, forming a third, dropping curtseys and touching its hat. In the cottage where the light had burned two nights ago, the blinds were drawn. They both noticed this token, but neither remarked upon it. That night was theirs. They skirted the pond, and he met her eyes, with his hand upon the little swing-gate. The churchyard lay before them, white and green in the sunlight—a different place. The peaceful building in the centre showed grey and venerable. The rectory-field followed, with its browsing sheep and the vicar’s mare nibbling contentedly at the low grass; then the white roadway with its hedges, tender with budding hawthorn—a different place.

Hancock had already packed his master’s things. The few hours that remained would be undivided.

They sipped their tea contentedly after they came in. How good it was to be alone! how good even to be silent thus; with the knowledge that she was in the same room, that an outstretched hand would meet hers, that he was free to look and look and look, and all the while she would be beside him.

“You have never loved anyone else?” she asked, crossing their reverie.

“There was a girl when I was a boy, and we pretended.”

“And since then?”

“Only you—I was waiting for you.” He answered her in all sincerity; she represented his “ideal woman,” the being he had half formulated, half dreamed on these many years.

“And I—I was waiting for you;” she repeated his words slowly, lingering over each one. Then, quickening, “Do you remember,” she asked, “those were almost the first words you spoke to me at the Stoke ball? I believe that’s why I liked you so . because I ... I was waiting as well!” She pressed his hand as she spoke. Her voice was uncertain, her eyes downcast. In that moment she had confessed a great deal.

“ But I thought you mistook me for Mills?”

“Only half—but I was surprised when you weren’t,” she answered, deliciously feminine in this juxtaposition.

They walked till dinner-time in the crossavenue that intersected the one that ran from the lawn to the lodge-gates.

Her hand was on his arm—after all, in a week or two their secret would be everybody’s.

Hancock, from the stables, where he was pominally watching the operations of his ally of the week before, had just ventured the opinion that he and his master would not wait so long before their next visit. “It’s ten to one against Mills, I fancy,” he sagely concluded.

“Five hundred! — not that Captain Mills ain’t a gentleman as anybody would be proud of; always tips gold, no harf-crowns with him like that there Mar-quis.”

“Well, it’s time he did settle down,—not that he’s been gay—always lived most quiet and respectable till lately,” said Hancock, who always spoke of his master as “he.”

“Don’t give much trouble, does he?” asked the other, already pondering over altered conditions of service. “Don’t waste all your time wi’ things o’ no value, does he?”

“ Gentle as a lamb, an’ only swears when there’s no dictionary word fitting.”

“Well, I rayther like a good ‘damn’ myself.”

“But you ’re a Methodist,” suggested Hancock, polite yet clinching.

“I’m not, either—'twas my last place,” explained the groom, “and that was Plymouth Brother.”

“I’ve never heard of them,” said Hancock, somewhat impressed by the unfathomed, yet disguising this under the supercilious. “Sounds like a breed of poultry,” said he; then, hedging, “but ‘ places is difficult,” he concluded.

Meanwhile, the lovers in the cross-avenue were discussing subject-matter of a less controversial character.

“I am so glad it should have come like this,” the Countess was saying, “and not suddenly and all of a rush. I was afraid at first,” she confessed,—“it was magnificent, but it was not love.”

“But there was the possibility of losing you!” he answered. “You remember that first afternoon when I wandered about in the rain till I thought of Carter-Page? I had almost lost you then—and it was terrible! I had given up all for you, everything that I had ever done or dreamt of doing.”

“You have never told me of that?” she gently urged.

Harvey confessed:

“I had written an opera. I had worked on it for three years, and when I met you it was just finished.”

“And the opera?”

“I—” he hesitated; “I destroyed it— destroyed everything that you had not shared.”

”We will write another,” she said.

“Live one, rather; this is the second act!”

His old conception of music-drama, the climax in the central act, still clung to him. He smiled over the involuntary conceit.

“You look like Lohengrin,” she said, mirroring his happiness.

“As though I’d been what Mark Twain calls ‘grailing’?” he returned, the smile deepening. “ By-the-by, we must go and see Sopwith; his opera’s due next month. We ’ll hear it and cheer?” And then he told her more about Oxford and the old life at the rooms in Down Street.

“You have never regretted it?” she asked when they had come to the end.

“No, darling,” he answered, cloudless.

“And yet,” said she, “I have often thought that you were more fit for something serious than this gadding.”

“So does the Marquis; he wants me to go into Parliament!”

Whereat they both laughed.

Harvey did not dress for dinner, but the Countess wore the gown of two nights ago. He recognised it as she entered the drawingroom, and sprang to her side.

“That was good of you, darling,” he said, proudly regarding the queenly figure. His near departure smote him. “I want something,” he exclaimed, “something that I can always have! ”

She took a sheaf of photographs out of a cabinet. He had seen others, but never anything so recent. By a strange coincidence, she had been taken in that very gown.

“Some premonition?” she hazarded, as he looked from her to the pictures, “and I wanted them to be for you.”

The man came in and announced dinner.

“These are mine,” said Harvey, deliberately choosing each position. He dropped them for the original.

She made him smoke in the drawing-room after their meal. Six quarters of an hour remained to them.

The blinds were drawn, and they sat side by side. Suddenly she arose and opened the piano.

“ Play!” she said.

He hesitated.

“For me?”

She returned to the sofa as he sat down.

“For you,” he said, fingering the keys.

Instinctively he turned to an episode in Isabella, a song of Lorenzo’s that was the culmination of his first act; an impassioned declaration that he had failed In a score of times, till at last, late one afternoon, a lovely face that had passed him in the street had given him the true impulse. The words had come for the mere writing—one of the few things of all his libretto that had lingered:

All the long day and the night.
All though the dark and the light,
I was alone, and I knew
You wanted me, and 1 too
Wanted you, ran the words.

From Harvey’s fingers now fell the original melody, a leaping-board from which he ascended improvising, swayed by a deeper and a richer flood of emotion than the anaemic stream of yester-year. He had left Isabella far below him, had risen to the larger passion of the man who had known those hours in the still churchyard—the stir of the blood as loved heart yearned to loved heart, as the love-warm lips met and sundered.

The Countess listened, spellbound and deathly silent, yet elate and following.

The year’s suppressed force, the melody that he had baffled these many months, had resurged all-powerful, sweeping the keys before it. His fingers seemed to run on uncontrolled, as something apart from himself. Effortless and with the ease of a master, he transmuted his exultation into music. This undreamt power, this unsuspected accession that made the instrument sing under his hands like a live thing, outstripping all former experience and manifestation, half-delighted, half-frightened him. It was as though he had suddenly discovered the keys of Life and Death, as a possession, piece and part of himself. He ceased playing and turned in his seat.

The Countess was once more beside him.

“You love me, as I love you—as I love you!” was all she said. Criticism of the rarest.

At last it was half-past nine, and Harvey would have to go and join Hancock, who was already down at the station with the baggage.

They parted indoors and again at the lodge gates, where he left her, turning his head every few steps to catch a farewell glimpse of the dim shape that watched him from the roadway. Again his path lay across the meadow and the churchyard.

“A woman!” he was muttering. “A woman —bless herl”

Harvey was alone in the carriage that took him up to Charing Cross. From all sides Lady Grasmere’s portrait smiled upon him. He had distributed the photographs about the seats. They were marvellous good company.

CHAPTER V
A LITTLE MORE MUSIC.

SOPWITH’S opera, Francesca of Rimini, was really going to be put on that season. Almost every paper that Merceron picked up at his club contained preliminary announcements to this effect: the announcement direct, the announcement indirect, the personal, the superfluous,—every variety, and all bearing marks of similar inspiration. Some of the illustrated weeklies even indulged in portraits of the gifted composer himself, and The Musical Messenger, ever in the van, added an exclusive biographical notice to the information already imparted in its news columns. Sopwith’s likeness, too, was on the front page, a matter of ten guineas cash, or twenty guineas credit. As Captain Mills had already stated, the sitter’s hair had gone to enormous lengths; and, in addition, pose, costume, and expression were founded on easily recognisable precedent. Sopwith, if this portrait did him justice, had certainly been equal to the most popular conception of the musical exterior.

Harvey smiled broadly over this transformation; the careless bow and the velvet coat, that had replaced the faultless garb of the olden days, afforded him an unalloyed delight.

“ I wonder if the music’s half as good as old Sop—pity he doesn’t call himself Soppesini!” he said, turning to the limited biography on the subsequent page.

This last partook greatly of the nature of those edifying fictions which are proclaimed by their authors to be “largely founded on fact.”

The composer’s nationality, his unimpeachable British descent, were insisted upon with all the fervour of the fourth-rate trade journalist over-eager to propitiate his audience. A stirring narrative! Sopwith’s feats as a lad, his brilliant Oxford career, his successful songs, the pride of his parents and their son’s devotion, were all deftly touched upon. Pathos and the admirative note blended; a character that the ladies have unanimously agreed to term “interesting” was unfolded in this pleasant history. Harvey’s smile grew broader.

Of the composer himself, however, Merceron saw nothing; for Sopwith pleaded pressure of business to every suggested meeting, and, indeed, judging by the amount of attention his opera was already receiving, he must have been indefatigable. So Harvey was left to picture his perspiring friend, rushing breathless from place to place in search of advertisement, with intervals for rehearsals and the seeing of interviewers.

That distinguished patron of the arts, the Marquis of Stoke, was more fortunate. Sopwith had even attended a reception at Stoke House. “A most talented young man; and not above accepting advice from his seniors,” was his host’s description of him. Indirectly, too, Merceron had gathered further tidings. Had he not been more pleasantly occupied, he might himself have encountered the mobile Sopwith, for the composer was fully living up to former precept, and securing all possible social notice. But Harvey was in no mood for crushes, and so allowed opportunity to pass him by. He had a seat in Lady Grasmere’s box for the first night of Francesca, and meanwhile other and more immediate calls occupied his time and attention.

The Countess was back at Albert Gate, and Harvey was troubling very little about Sopvvith or any other outside diversion just then. True, he still went out a great deal, wherever Lady Grasmere led the way. But she had withdrawn considerably from last year’s procession, and moved now only around an inner circle that kept reasonable hours and limited its entertainments. To these functions Sopwith had no access, for it required real social prestige to obtain cards for such smaller festivities, whereas most of the larger affairs were about as select as a race-meeting.

Harvey was to dine with Lady Grasmere the night that Sopwith’s opera came on, and Mrs, Hodgson was to be handed over to the Warings both before and after the performance. The conspirators had reserved that evening as soon as the date had transpired, quick to seize upon any opportunity for one of the few unchallenged tête-à-têies permitted them by the season’s whirl.

Their time would be their own in a month or two. They had preferred the present course, with Lady Horace and Mrs. Hodgson as sole confidantes, to the formalities of a duly paragraphed betrothal.

The evening, thus carefully set aside, arrived, doubly attractive; for, beside Lady Grasmere’s presence, there would be the diversion of a spectacle which Harvey was looking forward to with almost a personal interest. The first night of Francesca meant more to him than the presentation of a musical novelty written by an intimate friend. The situation was primarily one that he himself had but barely escaped; as such, would possess a spice of the exquisitely egotistical, a flavour of self that few men are permitted to enjoy without due sacrifice and imminent risk. He knew, too, that Sopwith’s work would be largely influenced by his own vanished method and vision. His step was more than ordinarily elastic as he walked o\er to Albert Gate that evening.

It was close on seven when Harvey came in. He had brought a spray of orchids for her ladyship, and was visibly excited over the evening’s arrangements. Mrs. Hodgson met him in the hall, ready for the cab that was to take her to the Warings.

“Punctual,” said she; “such deception too!” with mock indignation. The Countess joined them. “They’re always hours late when they’re married,” added Mrs. Hodgson.

“I ’m sorry,” said Harvey.

“So am I,” said the Countess.

“What about?” asked Mrs. Hodgson.

“That you’ve brought Mr. Hodgson up so wickedly,” said Harvey.

“So shamefully!” added the Countess.

“That’s my cab,” said Mrs. Hodgson, “and I’m only going to give him a shilling.”

They wished her good-night.

Dinner was ready, and the carriage would take them down in good time for the overture.

“I almost feel as though I’d written it myself,” declared Harvey, as they sat down. “It’s more exciting than I thought it would be: he’s not conducting himself—I would have done!”

His eagerness was infectious, and, as they dined, this new work was discussed with multifarious speculations as to the treatment.

“The wind up ought ..' to be splendid,” insisted Harvey. “Of course he will have them put to death on the stage—it ’ll make a splendid finale—I feel quite envious!” he exclaimed with dancing eyes.

Lady Grasmere assisted, joining in with:

“It ’ll be something like the finish of Tristan, only more dramatic. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes; only Lanciotto’s a brute, not a man like King Mark—and there’s no love philtre or magic of any kind—it’s almost modern,” he answered, following out the comparison that her question had suggested.

“I wonder whether they’ll have the scene in The Inferno? It would make a fine tableau at the end—Dante watching them sail by.”

But Harvey objected to this.

“It would be bad art — quite outside the tragedy—and one wouldn’t quite see the force of it unless one were a believing Papist,” he protested.

No external event had ever roused him as this. She had never fully recognised the artist in him till to-night. When he had played to her, only the musician had been evident; now, the critic completed a personality that was full of surprises.

Their light meal was swiftly served. Harvey was to come back afterwards for some supper. There was time for a cigarette and coffee before the carriage would be round.

The Countess was looking hard at Merceron in the interval. She suddenly interrupted this brown study, and came over to him.

“Harvey,” she said probingly, “you ’re never going to get spoiled, are you?”

He shook his head in contradiction, wondering.

“You were quite your first self just now,” she resumed, “just now when we were guessing what the opera was going to be like—I was so happy. Sometimes, of late, I think you’ve lost a great deal,” she continued, “and sometimes I’m sure I’m mistaken. I do so wish that you ’ll never get like the other men one knows, hard to please and critical—and more selfish than is absolutely necessary.” She smiled as she added this last item to the rest, but there was an earnest, even an undernote of sadness, running through her voice.

“I won’t, darling; I didn’t quite know that I had altered—I haven’t, have I? In fact,” he added, with evasive lightness, “the only change I’ve noticed is that I usually have a brandy-and-soda in the morning—which I never used to.”

She leaned over his shoulder and placed her cheek on his:

“There’s no real difference, and you ’re ever so much nicer, really,” she said, “but one becomes machine-made if one lets one’s self go.”

“That’s just what I did at the beginning,” he gaily expostulated.

She smiled as well.

“I don’t mean that sort, but getting indifferent just to save one’s self the trouble of thinking,” she resumed; “I know it’s easy, but, Harvey, I often think that that’s the reason why half the men one meets are such bores—and some of them were such nice boys once!”

He kissed the dear face thoughtfully.

“I don’t think I’m ever likely to become a vegetable?” he said.

“You won’t, will you? It’s time we were starting!”

“You are no end of a dear,” he whispered five minutes later, as they sat in the brougham.

Her hand stole into his.

Outside roared London, with voice redoubled, fully raised; a chorus, joyous, gigantic, hailing its evening release, trumpeting forth its myriad anticipations. Westwards and eastwards, through the sounding street, the traffic surged, and pavements were gay with life and motion.

Calm, as though filled with an unutterable peace, the blue of heaven showed above the housetops, contrasting, almost consciously contrasting, with the strife below—a protest and a promise.

The carriage picked its way, through and under, one of a hundred that that night emptied before the portico of the Covent Garden opera house. And now Harvey and the Countess were in their box, studying the programme and libretto of Sopwith’s initial flight, Francesca of Rimini.

CHAPTER VI
STILL MORE MUSIC.

THE house was rapidly filling. A flowing stream of fashionable arrivals poured through the lobby, wound up the broad staircase, was dispersed in the curving corridors. The doors of the countless boxes that wall the auditorium, those doors whereon you may read some of the proudest names in Europe, turned ceaselessly on their hinges. A great crowd manifestly attracted by an exceptional occasion —this unique performance—was swiftly gathering. Years had elapsed since the work of a British-born composer had been presented in this classic house.

An air of expectancy, of anticipation, hung over the huge theatre. The performance that was about to open had been heralded with no common vigour. Long before the door had flung back a swarming queue had gathered about the entrances to the cheaper seats. The amateurs of the gallery, those rigid connoisseurs to whom such an evening meant a solid curtailment of more material delights, had paid their hard-earned silver and were preparing to sit in judgment. They had studied the libretto, read the evening paper, struck up casual acquaintanceships, or discussed the classics with feeling and determination, the half-hour past. It was hot up there—terribly hot and crowded; the seats hard as inferior railway accommodation.

Below these serried ranks sat the suburban enthusiast, feminine for the most part, who had sent postal orders to the booking-office weeks beforehand. A more serious and formal company this, muttering occasional complaint anent the inaccessibility of the score, occasionally proclaiming its relationship to a press-ticket in the stalls—some critic whom publicity had severed from the obscurity of the remnant. The foreign element so marked here on other nights, was conspicuously absent. The performances of a British composer it looked upon as an encroachment, as something “foul and most unnatural.” Here, as above, all was compact and apprehensive, and the brilliant light that emanated from the huge chandelier showed no vacant seat. And the young women who preponderated, attired in costumes reminiscent of Liberty and the New Gallery, waited eager and discovered celebrities, in the mass below.

Even the stalls and boxes had shared in the prevailing punctuality. Sopwith’s friends and patrons—and their tale was legion—had come to shower applause and encouragement. Though to a certain extent lacking in the discrimination of the cheaper seats, these later arrivals were better dressed, and most of them had come in their own carriages. They leavened the floor of the house, they leaned over the cushions of half the boxes. A certain satisfaction as of proprietorship overspread their features; the sense of an almost personal share in the evening’s doings flattered agreeably. Even the least susceptible responded to this subtle invitation to play a gracious rôle. Their vanity had been caressed by an appeal so delicate as to have escaped consciousness.

Mingled with these dilettanti were the politer members of the profession, wearers of the laurel wreath, musicians of assured renown, middle-aged or grey, who had come in to assist at the enterprise of a junior; a polyglot community of carefully groomed lions, leonine too in the richness of their hirsute adornments; men and women whom the platform had set unmistakably apart from the pursuers of a less florid career. Secure upon pedestals whose stability no new arrival could endanger, these famous champions twirled their moustachios, and indulgently suffered the scrutiny of an admiring public. The younger generation was seated with its seniors, symbolising the Millennium. A sterner and a more exacting band this younger generation, it had evidently come prepared to accept nothing but a score entirely orchestral, methods the most advanced. Technique was manifest on its unflinching front, purity of feeling its most modest requirement; for the younger generation had lived and had frequented the new academies, and now waited, an uncompromising crew, gloomily expectant, and pessimistically scenting a barbarous rejection of all its own most cherished theories.

In the stalls, too, were the critics, a row of strangely assorted faces bespeaking varieties of temperament sufficient to furnish an anthropological museum; a veritable Noah’s Ark of representative types—the thoughtful and scholarly, severely conscientious and of an open mind; the facile egotistical and the facile plausible, both equally bent on concealment of ignorance though differing in method; the accidentally critical, irresponsible and scintillating; the missionary enthusiastic, ardent and filled with prophesy; the sound and weighty, unadventurous and shy of innovation; the prettily sensuous, emotional and ladylike; the Cockney brilliant, anarchic and in constant opposition—the list is endless. The woman-critic too, the reticent and the gushing, the classical and the flamboyant, was also in pursuit. And interleaving this varied assembly was the fashionable mob, bejewelled and bediademed, the heroes and heroines of the London season, the children of light whose ease and radiance had so shaken our friend Merceron some nine months since, when, with Hutchinson on his arm, he had re-entered the world.

Now, above the chatter, the greetings and speculations, the movement of all this eager multitude, arose the scrapings and strange noises of an orchestra making ready. This tuning-up ceased and with it the well-bred gossip. The conductor had stepped into his place; expectation electrified the air.

In the box where sat Harvey and Lady Grasmere reigned an alert silence. The libretto of Francesca had been laid aside. They were waiting. The conductor gave the signal. From the ’cello yearned pianissimo the first bars of the overture—the overture to Isabella.

The violins swelled the movement, the flutes and oboes softened the rising volume, and Harvey sat in the semi-darkness wondering whether he were asleep or waking. He looked across at his companion, but she was listening unmoved, an arm resting on the cushioned front of their box. The quiet was unbroken, the music continued, undisturbed save for the rustle of a few late-comers tiptoeing to their seats. The overture proceeded, ebbing and flowing, theme melting into theme, as he had planned it; no break in the familiar continuity, episode on episode, till, at the end, only the violins spoke, dwelling on that minor melody which Harvey had improvised from that night when he took train for London, when he had played as never before—for her. The incomplete thing sighed out itswoe, a sweet enough trifle—too sweet, perhaps—yet of a certain grace and beauty; an undeniably promising youthfulness. The conductor’s wand dropped. The house hesitated a moment. Then Sopwith’s friends broke the silence, applauding from the three quarters. Other hands followed, filling the theatre with an encouraging echoing and re-echoing. Merceron, deathly pale, was gazing straight ahead, speechless and vaguely wondering as to what would, follow upon this opening of surprise and betrayal.

The curtain rose upon a splendid imposition, upon a libretto transformed, an Isabella masquerading as Francesca, a Lorenzo impersonifying Paolo. Harvey’s music had been ail but retained. The two stories were sc nearly alike, and Sopwith had made full use of opportunity, had deftly altered the libretto, yet retained the setting—Sopwith, the thief!

Instead of the household of the two brothers, the movement of the first act transpired at the palace of the lord of Rimini. Very cleverly was this transposition effected. The license of the librettist had been taken full advantage of by the author of the book. He had retained the exact form of the original version, had retold his story in the very mould of Merceron’s Isabella. The two tales were so nearly alike, and he had overlooked all difference, following the expression of the music, and unfolding his tragic history with a singular dexterity. A clever rogue undoubtedly was this librettist, despite the many advantages of the situation. For the most had been in his favour. The suppressed passion of the lovers, half confessed, yet only half suspected—the two narratives were identical. Their meetings, clandestine in the one case, permitted in the other, and then the avowal (here over the open book that told of the fall of Lancelot and Guinevere), the impassioned declaration that followed—their stories held no vital difference.

Merceron sat silent to the end, till that one redeeming melody, Lorenzo’s heated confession, brought down the curtain on the opening act. Again the audience wavered, till Sopwith’s friends leading the applause decided the undecided. The lights flashed up, the singers responded; then a babel of chatter, a flourish of critical pencils, and invasion. And all the while Harvey had not spoken, nor had the Countess. Their thoughts were speedily disturbed. Sir Horace and Lady Waring had come in with Mrs. Hodgson.

“Rather ambitious,” ventured Sir Horace. “Rather ambitious.” But Harvey had no heart for discussion. He wanted fresh air.

“ I am going out to see a man—excuse me for a moment?” he said, snapping his opera-hat. Then he left them.

CHAPTER VII
THE VICTIMS.

HARVEY did not stay in the theatre. He wanted to be alone, to be unobserved; the load of the present was more than he could openly support. The unfamiliar walls repelled, the enclosed space stifled him; every face that he encountered was a new constraint; and his feelings must have free play, his frame fresh air, or he would suffocate.

He crossed the hall and went out into the street, escaping the light and the oppressive contact of the audience; turning away into a dark and empty passage, one of the many that open out on to the great market. Here he was undisturbed, only one other pedestrian disputed the seclusion.

This alley of Merceron’s was by night an almost lifeless place, a strip of asphalt running between the huge bulk of a row of warehouses and a blank wall of the opera house that adjoined a similar wall belonging to one of the market buildings. These many-storied warehouses were dark and tenantless, only less sombre than the opposing masonry; and through these two silences ran the narrow passage, its feeble gas-lamps waging hopeless warfare with a darkness enclosed, hemmed in, and black with shadow.

At the mouth of this byway there gleamed the misty radiance of two opposing public-houses; yet between lay a more than sufficient desert of gloomy asphalt. This, Harvey could pace uninterrupted, alone with the resurgent flood that had taken him by the throat and forced him out of doors.

The man in front of Merceron reached the yellow glare from the two corners, but, instead of continuing across the market, checked himself and turned. They passed each other in the dim passage, and Harvey, unaware of the retracement, went on to the public-house lights, then back again. Once more they met on their opposing beats.

The even footfalls in the empty street merged imperceptibly into the rhythm of Harvey’s thoughts. In later years he never recalled this interval of refuge, without an accompanying understrain of steady footfalls. The man repassed him, and he looked up. They were near one of the gas-lamps.

“It’s no go,” said Merceron, “you’re in for it.”

His imaginary conversation with Sopwith was now replaced by a more real interview.

The composer halted, recognised the speaker, with mind zigzaging till it reached a position that enabled it to grasp Harvey’s remark, a'nd, approximately, his attitude.

“It breaks down, goes from bad to worse as the story intensifies,” continued Merceron, very calmly, with the tone and manner of a man facing an already accomplished fadt.

“Do you really think so?” asked Sopwith uneasily. His voice acknowledged all the old ascendency, the old instinctive faith in Merceron’s judgment—the exaggerated belief of the consciously unoriginal artist in the man of convictions.

“It must fail, there’s nothing more for it to live on, the rest’s all limp—soft as butter.”

“But they seemed pleased, they were clapping all over the house just now and after the overture,” urged Sopwith.

“There was that one thing of Lorenzo’s— but there’s nothing else left, it can’t go on.” The composer listened like one doomed.

Merceron’s words fell with a finality that overpowered even the most laggard of his hopes.

“But you thought it good—you were pleased with it,” he protested.

“I was when I wrote it—the workmanship is good, good enough to be proud of—but there’s no real life in it, the workmanship’s all wasted on unreal emotion,” returned Harvey, patiently dissecting Isabella, more for his own delectation than for Sopwith’s. He continued, evenly as before, with an exasperating calm, “I had no real experience, I was writing about things I did not understand—it’s all ineffectual, not a natural emotion in it except that glimmer of a one they sang just now.”

“But—” Sopwith attempted. He could get no further, could find no objection; even suspicion of Harvey’s disinterestedness was disarmed by the business-like exposition with which he had just been favoured.

“But?” questioned Merceron who was waiting.

“ It may come through?” hazarded Sopwith, more to supply an evident demand than from any latent hopefulness.

Harvey shook his head.

“No, not this, perhaps the next, the next may; but you don’t understand, you never will understand.” The futile words, the unintelligence of his questioner, w'ere wearying him. He had said all he had to say.

Yet Sopwith remained, breaking out desperately with:

“Why did you believe in it then—why did you believe in it!”

“You know how I used to live, shut up from everything, feeling everything with my head instead of—but you don’t understand,” replied Merceron. He was growing impatient, the interview was being needlessly prolonged.

“But what shall I do—what am I to do?” demanded Sopwith in the voice of a drowning man. “What shall I do!”

Harvey shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t know—it’s your own fault.”

But Sopwith defended himself.

“It isn’t. I never meant to do this,” he whined; “I never meant to do this!” Harvey took'a pace forward, but the composer followed him.

“You think me a thief?” he said, clutching at a lapel of Harvey’s coat.

“I could—but I ’rn not bothering about that!”

”But I’m not—I’m not a thief! I was trapped! ”

Merceron looked wonderingly at his erstwhile friend. Was the man demented?

“Trapped,” repeated Sopwith, “trapped! You don’t know what I’ve had to put up with all these months; and now—and now it’s going all wrong!” and he burst into tears, breaking down completely, weeping hysterically in that narrow passage, that strip of walled-in asphalt, running back to where the yellow lights shone from the two public houses that overlooked the great market.

Harvey had severed himself from his own thoughts, was trying to follow the obscure accusations of the abject wretch at his side.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

A faint sound as of a distant orchestra floated on to the silence.

“They’re beginning again,” said Sopwith. He had pulled himself together, was listening eagerly. “Isn’t it any good? It must be some good—it must be some good, or else they wouldn't play it!” he exclaimed with growing conviction. The genuineness of the performance must have some equally genuine justification, some raison d’être proportionately vigorous.

But Harvey’s gesture shattered the fugitive assumption. The former tone returned, an even greater degree of desperation than before.

“What am I to do afterwards? I’m quite ruined!” Sopwith’s hand still clutched the lapel. “ I ’ve put money into it—every cent I’ve got, and I’ve borrowed, and my reputation ’s clean gone. I can’t disclaim it and say it’s yours; you won’t say it’s yours, and if you did--” The distracted wretch paused, speechless and dazed, as he began to realise the multiplied hopelessness of his position, the completeness of this checkmating. “What am I to do—whatever am I to do?” he was sobbing afresh. “And all these months, as though they weren’t enough—why did you ask me to come that evening, and why weren’t you in? I didn’t want to take it! I hadn’t meant to take anything! I never took anything in my life before or since! It’s your doing, you and that man who let me in—yours and his!”

Harvey’s perplexity was growing. The spectacle at which he was assisting had swamped his own private drama.

“What do you mean by all this?” he asked. “What man, and who let you in? I know nothing about either of you, unless—” He paused. Was Sopwith referring to Hutchinson’s brother officer and his own former suspect? “ What had the man to do with you?” he asked abruptly.

“Didn’t he tell you, and don’t you know? You must have asked him. You knew it was I who took the music, didn’t you?” Sopwith’s voice rose with each question; his companion’s ignorance seemed incredible. “You must have asked him, and you knew it was I?” he repeated. “Why, you wrote me an insulting letter—called me an idiot twice!”

“ I didn’t. I only found you out to-night. I told you I hadn’t worried,” Harvey briefly replied.

“But you saw how I was keeping out of your way, month after month; and didn’t that man tell you that he let me in as he was leaving?”

“ He was a friend of a friend, and I’ve never even seen him.”

“And I made sure that he would tell you; that you knew all the time. I’ve been miserable ever since, wondering what was going to happen; and yet I couldn’t go back. You don’t know what I’ve had to put up with; and now, my God! this is more than I deserve! I’m going to be paid out further, as though I hadn’t had enough already!” and the miserable victim shook and swayed in a very passion of remorse as the uselessness of all his plotting drove deeper.

Harvey steadied him against the wall.

“Boot laces, buy a pair—” but the man passed on without concluding his appeal. Sopwith’s face had silenced him. “Toffs!” he muttered; “toffs! No, ’tweren’t booze— nor ill. Gawd bless you, sir!” Harvey had flung him a coin. He shuffled off towards the lights at the corner.

The distant orchestra, itself tragi-comical, still murmured, whispered its accompaniment to the tragi-comedy that was being enacted in this remote byway of Central London.

So Hutchinson’s friend had waited, and Sopwith had met him as he was leaving the Down Street Chambers. The door had been open and Sopwith had walked in.

He was still discoursing, raging against misfortune, the tears beading his cheeks:

“Trapped! trapped by you two!”

He repeated the charge a dozen times.

“Supposing you consider your own share of the business?” suggested Harvey at last.

But Sopwith flared up:

“He let me in, didn’t he? and you had asked me to come. . . . He wanted to know if I were you first, and when I said I wasn’t he went downstairs, leaving your door open for me to walk in; and no one knew I had come, and he didn’t know who I was.”

“Well?”

“Don’t you see how I was tempted? . . . I was alone in your rooms, and nobody had seen me come in except that man who didn’t know me from a crow. I sat down and waited for you, meaning no harm; and then suddenly the temptation came. . . . I knew how you’d worked on the thing, and that it was finished.

. . . I thought you were a genius, and that that opera was a work of genius. . . . Don’t you see how I was tempted? . . . And it was in the cabinet, and no one knew I was there. . . . I could get it put on if I had it, I was almost sure of that; I knew all the right people. . . . And if you had it you would never do any good with it; you would never have troubled to get it produced. You weren’t the man to make up to the management, to ask for favours, and bother about all sorts of useful people. The lock was almost rotten, it gave as soon as I touched it . . . and no one had seen me come in, and no one saw me go out. That’s all. . . . And what else could I have done? You know hew poor I am, and that I am not specially clever. What could I do but take it? . . . It wasn’t stealing ... I never thought of it till I’d been there quite a time . . . and I’d come up because you’d asked me to. . . . Everything helped to make me take it—any musician would have taken it! ... It was almost an invitation . . . And here am I punished and you two allowed to go scot free! . . . And now you say it’s no good—you say it’s no good—and I've put money into it; and there’s my name! . . . Perhaps I deserve something . . . but not this! . . . I’ve been miserable all these nine months. . . . There was that letter I wrote you saying I’d been up the river ... I thought that man would upset it ... a perfect hell it’s been! . . . And I’ve still got to pay the man who altered your libretto ... I believe he suspects . . . And now—what’s that!”

Sopwith’s lamentations had ceased, he had started back, was listening eagerly, madly, with the face of a famished beast awakening to the distant plash of water.

“They’re clapping—they’re clapping!” he cried. “You devil—you lying hound!” Then he made off, escaping by various narrow streets to the stage-door.

Harvey was alone. The muffled sound of far-away applause had replaced the droning of the distant orchestra.

CHAPTER VIII
GHOSTS.

HARVEY’S self-possession had returned to him. The interview with Sopwith was succeeded by a calm, a passionate quietude; his nerves were steel, his thoughts perfectly controlled. His will power now gripped his whole being as in a vice. The tumult, the fever of revolt, which had seized upon him in the theatre, had given way to this colder passion. Sopwith’s hysteria and incoherence had confronted him, a blurred reflection of his own excess, a danger-signal warning him of his own nearness to the chaotic.

He had left Lady Grasmere’s box with a mind whirling methodless and destructive * through his own career: for, with this re-introduction to Isabella, to this work of his, to this epitome of all that had been altruistic in his life, the musician had reawakened; the master-passion that had slumbered these nine months had opened wide its eyes, had called to him, and he had leapt upright at the sound. The craving of the artist to bring forth, the hunger to create, and the irresistible impulse towards expression, the full lust of conquest, had returned—a tide broad as infinity. Rushing and foaming and tumbling, it had swept down all the little dykes which he had built. And he had breasted these waters, had struck out alone from the dry land, had turned his face from all his erstwhile sheltering places—such refuges were pitiful! The half-life he had been leading, the people he had led it with, were alike pitiful and infirm. Theirs was the true half-world.

The desire to be alone, alone with the present and the future, alone as henceforth he must always be, had impelled him out of doors. He had taken his agony into the street, had paced up and down with it, till Sopwith had met him with another drama.

At first a play of marionettes, this drama of Sopwith’s had not impinged until from the pigmy spectacle had developed a more pressing, immediate, active drama than Harvey’s own, a tragi-comedy that had turned his inwardlooking eyes outward. Only caused him to reverse his gaze, no single emotion. The composer’s ragings had left him unmoved, for the material success or non-success of Isabella had no share in his own plight, and his fatherhood was intact—a wilderness of Sopwiths could not deprive him of this fatherhood, although they might steal his child. The one effect of the composer's moral dishevelment was to cause Harvey to turn his gaze outward; and he had recognised the drunken helot, a chaos that neared his own. The spectacle made him gather in his wandering senses, revert to sobriety. By the time that Sopwith had rushed off, reanimated by his audience’s applause, Merceron had come to a complete understanding with himself. He regained the Countess’ box, erect and self-possessed.

Lady Grasmere was surrounded by a changing group of visitors, the interval before the last act was at its noon. She gave Harvey a smile of welcome as he entered, and, for a moment, his own face softened.

Only Lady Waring remarked upon his lengthy absence, pouncing down upon him with—

“Drove you away, did it; come now, it wasn’t quite as bad as all that?”

“A matter of taste,” returned Harvey, grimly calm.

The Marquis of Stoke turned to him.

“Your friend, Mr. Sopwith, will have to try again. I don’t say but that he has the root of the matter in him, but at present—” The tone of the voice and a gesture completed the sentence.

“Perhaps he will try again,” said Harvey.

Here a Lady Soames joined in the discussion.

“The second act rather missed fire,” she shrilly declared; “but there’s the third— the third may pull it off, don’t-cher know,” and she wagged her head mysteriously. She was the proprietress of a well-known racing stable, and therefore a woman of much experience.

The Countess had made no remark.

The discussion continued.

“That song in the first act was quite pretty; I shall have to get that song,” said Lady Waring.

“Wonder where he took it from? ” drawled a well-known critic, who formed one of the company.

“Think he—think he inserted it?” asked Lady Soames.

“That has been done before,” the Marquis gravely intoned.

Lady Grasmere was still only a listener.

The Marquis continued:

“I am disappointed; the work is not what it should be—not what it should be.”

“A sincere opinion is always valuable,” Harvey slowly returned; “even when it is worthless,” he added, grimly.

Lady Horace, who had heard, shook a forefinger at him.

“Wicked,” she said, laughing, “very wicked!”

Lord Stoke was unconsciously proceeding with further deliverances.

“Who’s the American girl in the Bullers’ box?” asked Lady Soames.

“Pretty girl, isn’t she?” said the critic; “I thought she was French.”

“Only the hair: the face is American, and .so’s the jewellery,” diagnosed one of the men.

The conversation drifted from Sopwith’s opera into more familiar channels. Only the Marquis clung to matters musical.

“I’m sorry,” he said to Harvey; “I thought the young man might have made a beginning. There’s a want of it—we English are terribly backward.”

“He’s young,” answered Harvey, with twitching nerves.

“Yes—yes,” the Marquis dubiously agreed.

They were interrupted by a new-comer, a lady whose evening had been a distracting medley of curiosity and generous applause.

“What do you think of it, Marquis?”

She rattled on without giving the old gentleman a chance of venting an opinion.

“We’ve all been clappin’ as hard as we could. Mr. Sopwith’s such a nice young man, and so very interesting; he dined with us the night before last, and we all promised we’d come and see him through: you ’ll keep it up afterwards, and make him come on; and you, too, Mr. Merceron?” she pleaded.

And Mrs. Hopgood-Smyth smiled her sweetest on them and Lady Grasmere, then darted off to another box. Besides applauding herself, she was evidently bent on being the cause of applause in others.

“I’m going back to Mrs. Hodgson and Sir Horace—he’s looking lonely!” cried Lady Waring, laying down an opera-glass. “Anybody supping at the Savoy—you—you?” She looned round as she spoke. “No—no? See you again then. Good-night.”

“ What are you going to say about the thing?'’ asked someone of the critic.

“State secret,” he answered mysteriously “I must go downstairs again and find out— can't think about music up here.”

He accentuated the compliment with a gallant inclination towards Lady Grasmere, and then went on to the verandah and smoked a cigarette, pondering over the new American beauty, his tailor’s bill, Saturday’s damnation of Francesca, and various other matters, till the bell rang for the final act.

In Lady Grasmere’s box the corning and going continued. The previous conversations were repeated with temperamental differences. Harvey, rigidly courteous, suffered all these bland inanities, could even afford to smile over them. For to-morrow he would Ire rid of all these people, he would be at work again, and all these peacocking nonentities with their strident voices, steady conceit, and hundred limitations—even their very ignorance was limited, he reflected with a certain grim mirthfulness—all these sawdust masqueraders would be but an absurd recollection.

The chatter about him ran on to the end, till the conductor reappeared. And all the while Lady Grasmere had said no word to him; indeed, he had hardiy heard her voice.

CHAPTER IX
ERRORS AND COMEDY.

THE curtain had risen on the final act of Francesca of Rimini, and once more the audience was silent; only the orchestra filled the darkened house with sound. Harvey sat alone with Lady Grasmere, half expecting that she would seize upon the opportunity and question him; but no, she was apparently occupied with the scene before them, the stage whereon Paolo and Francesca were energetically misinterpreting the third act of Isabella.

Harvey had had some difficulty with this last part of his libretto, had been obliged to diverge considerably from Boccaccio’s story: entirely omitting the incident of the pot of basil, and, with it, the lingering termination of the original. Instead, by substituting a continuous and swifter action, he had brought his story to a more conventional, though no less tragic, close. The hunting-party in the forest was the first episode of the final act. The two brothers entered and reiterated their intention to slay the hapless Lorenzo, then hid behind some trees. The tenor followed, his face “flush with love,” and giving utterance to his feelings. He was interrupted by the brothers, who first killed and then, buried him, amid orchestral wailings. They departed, making way for Isabella and her nurse. The former explained how she had had a vision, wherein she had seen her lover murdered and his body hidden upon that very spot. She recognised various landmarks common to the two localities—the forest of the vision and this forest. A voice broke in upon her sad declamation. She listened. It was Lorenzo answering her, telling her of his treacherous murder and his undying love. She staggered to the “fresh thrown mould,” responded in an ebbing death-song, and expired upon her lover’s grave. So ended Isabella.

Sopwith and his librettist had had a great many difficulties to contend against in the manipulation of this portion of the score and book. The whole course of events was altogether different, but in spite of these discouragements, the pair had worked wonders. For the forest they had substituted a dungeon in the Castle of the Lord of Rimini. Here the lovers were imprisoned. Francesca opened the Act with Isabella’s recitative, lamenting her own and her lover’s impending doom in very similar terms to Isabella’s account of the vision. Paolo interrupted this mournful declamation with Lorenzo’s answering tones, transposed, more robustly set—for he was not singing from somewhere underground. He, too, discoursed of imminent death, of his undying affection. Then Lanciotto and his favourite minion entered, sword in hand, and delivered themselves in a manner precisely similar to the bass and baritone threatenings of the two brothers in the legitimate opening scene. Paolo defied them with Lorenzo’s flushed utterance, which was cut short by a slaughtering identical with the bloodshed of the genuine version. Francesca was also despatched, and the curtain descended amid the orchestral wallings.

So terminated Sopwith’s noisily heralded music-drama, Francesca of Rimini, a thing of splendid opportunities imperfectly grasped, a wonderful story marred by impotent treatment, a youthful extravagance, fruit of a too eager brain, of juvenile impatience—a work entered into rashly, heedlessly, an undertaking blindly pursued, and pathetic with the reckless daring of inexperience.

Through the whole opera there ran an irritating air of largeness, a mock-perfection that angered; for the workmanship was carried out with a care, an acuteness, a deftness of touch and an unsparing devotion at once pitiful and grotesque. It seemed as though the composer, lacking all intimacy with Life, had perforce vented all his powers upon this framework, upon the vase wherein he had bestowed his artificial flowers. A very emblem and a monument was this opera. Soaring youth articulate had chiselled it, overspread it, had fed it with its own vague emotions, undisciplined now and now hesitant, its own incertainties; had filled it with its own blind impulses, shrinkings, and labours misapplied—the errors that chasten. The work, though ineffectual, was brave enough and clean with honest endeavour. There was, indeed, no cause for shame in the effort; its public appearance was its one sin, it had no right to thrust itself thus brazenly upon a busy world. The conscientious and scholarly critic in the stalls viewed the thing not altogether unfavourably. Of that whole audience, perhaps he and Harvey alone knew Isabella's proper place, assessed it at its real value. It had taught its author how to write. Matter, direct and sure emotion, the great sanity, might come with the years.

The curtain had fallen amid a stubborn silence that ended in a sigh of relief. The gallery and amphitheatre sought its hat, heavily disappointed, yet bearing the blow without a murmur; for there were patriotic as well as musical issues at stake.

Francesca of Rimini, with all its faults, was of native growth, was deserving of sympathy as the plucky though unsuccessful attempt of a British composer to attain to a place beside the pre-eminent foreigner. More in sorrow than in anger, therefore, did the multitude prepare for departure.

In the boxes and stalls, however, a different and a less Sentimental spirit prevailed. Here the decorum, the self-respect of the upper circles was replaced by a far-spreading display of foolishness. Sopwith’s friends and patrons, the Mrs. Hopgood-Smyths and their compeers, beat their gloved hands together, and made their men-folkjoin this acclamation. As before, a wave of artificial and ill-considered applause was set in motion by the occupants of the more expensive portions of the house. But this time the cheaper seats refused to swell the hubbub, remained cold, unresponsive, were not to be inveigled into the deception. Resentment rather filled the honest gods at this vain argument. Their good-nature had been already strained to its extreme.

The applause continued, sustained, persistent. Two or three ominous hisses, protestant from the gallery, blended with the noise from below, were drowned, however, by the opposition; and the clapping continued, redoubling in vigour as the curtain rose upon the performers, was aided by a hundred voices as Sopwith appeared, bland, clean-shaven, a flower in his coat, apparently none the worse for his recent collapse—the very image of his published portrait.

The vain applause reached its full limits as he bowed his thanks, hand on heart—a pleasing embodiment of conscious merit chastened by modesty. The offended deities chafed at the spectacle. By now the situation was fully revealed to them; they had recognised the relationship between claque and composer, their outraged sentiment had found voice, their resentment liberal expression. The Briton, who had spared the victim of honourable defeat, showed less mercy to the charlatan, the humbug.

The welcome from the stalls and boxes was now but barely audible above a rising volume of groans and hisses. The composer’s friends, hopelessly outnumbered and already at fullest tension, at the extreme limit of their powers, tried to prevail, to hold their own. But the raging up above increased, grew to a sibillant roar, a tempest that carried all before it. They were overpowered; their counterings swallowed up, drowned and lost, sunk to a mere undistinguishable item of the general outcry, had at last gone to swell the furious protest from above. A new comer, entering at this moment, would have fancied the house unanimous in its condemnation, have suspected no warring of divided interests. Even the bowing Sopwith was taken aback, dumbfounded by the swiftness of this inversion, had failed to keep pace with his audience’s apparent change of front.

Prey to a fresh series of violent transformations, his unhappiness was unmistakable. Once more he had been victimised, deluded, trapped; once more his child-like confidence and trust had been rewarded by a rude betrayal. A sudden fail of the curtain hid him from the audience, ended the hubbub, and he was left alone upon the boards to face the furious management.

Thus ended the first and last performance of Sopwith’s initial effort towards the regeneration of the British Operatic Stage; in a scene memorable alike to spectators and participants, a scene that afforded the critics even more scope than the work itself, the musical world an even greater degree of delectation.

Harvey, impassive as a Beethoven, displaying even some of that master’s greatness . in the stoicism with which he received impact after impact, a succession of shocks that would have doubly and trebly destroy ed the composure of a lesser man, had looked on imperturbable, through the final act, with its succeeding engagement, rout, débâcle. For his thoughts were rather on the morrow than on any present spectacle; he was reserving his powers for a greater work than the pursuit of an ignominious imposition, was saving his energies for the larger combat. The failure of Isabella caused him neither regret nor surprise; he recognised the opera merely as a probationary exercise, a ’prentice-work preliminary to mastership. As for the unannounced effects which followed, the audience’s contributions, their additions to the official harmonies, he had taken these lightly, more as an interested spectator than as something affecting himself.

When, after the finale, the Hopgood-Smyths had vented vain applause, Harvey had smiled incredulously and helped the Countess into her cloak; at Sopwith’s unexpected reappearance, curiosity had blended with his scepticism. The gallery’s rising disapproval made • him pause.

“Surely it wasn’t bad enough for all this fuss—heaven save a man from such friends!” he said to Lady Grasmere who, standing beside him, was following the spectacle.

She nodded acquiescence, and then the duello that ensued, with its swift termination in one general, undistinguishable demonstration of disgust, eclipsed the first interest. Harvey, quick to feel the workings, the several provocations which had given rise to this tumult, sympathised momentarily with the upper circles, the outraged deities above. Momentarily, however; for at last the sublimity of his own position reached him, crowned this bevy of unrealities with the one essential, the one deep-rooted fact. He recognised in himself the unseen dramatist. It was he who had set these players in motion. Without him, all this theatre, with its perspiring audience, disordered composer, performers and management, had been but an empty shell.

The situation was one of appalling comedy. Insistent and farcical there occurred to him the makings of an additional scene, a culmination and a climax worthy of the occasion. What if he should cry “Silence!” from his box and explain that he was the real culprit, the identical; that they were wasting their energies, their wind and muscle upon an innocent man; that the wretch they were hounding was altogether blameless; that they, he, Sopwith, the whole company, were the victims of a chain of unforeseen circumstances which he himself had set in motion! And Harvey laughed aloud over his suppressed oration. How the popular novelist would have revelled in it, with what melodrama would he have engarlanded such a speech delivered under such circumstances! The falling of the curtain interrupted fhis train of thought, the people were leaving and Sopwith had disappeared.

Merceron and the Countess descended the broad staircase, the crowd at their elbows, behind and before them, filling the entrance hall and passing homewards amid the flash of carriage lamps, the rattle of hoof and harness. The air was full of exclamations, flying discussions, and the immediate.

Nine months ago—years they seemed to Harvey as he looked down upon this commotion—he and Hutchinson had stood atten tive upon that self-same spot, had watched this self-same crowd. With what other feelings, what other attitude, what reversals of present emotion! Years ago it seemed to Harvey! But the Countess’ man had caught his eye, had come forward touching his hat. Now Lady Grasmere and he were in the brougham, alone together, and rolling towards Albert Gate.

Poor Harvey! if there had been anything of pain, anything of struggle, if he had at all suffered that night, it was now that his real trial and torment were to begin!

CHAPTER X
ERRORS AND CORRECTIONS.

T'HE carriage rolled steadily homewards— a short enough journey; yet to Harvey, with mind bent and fixed upon the one impending certainty, laden with the one harrowing resolve, that drive was long and heavy as some final trundling towards a place of execution. With a heart leaden-weighted, impervious to all save the sense of this one burden, he sat speechless beside the woman from whom he was now to part, whom he must now renounce —with the rest, vmh all the misplacement and glitter of the last nine months.

Their silence was well-nigh unbroken. Only touch, the almost impalpable pressure of her wrappings, of the silken draperies that imagination warmed with the shape they enclosed, spoke to Harvey—was but once interrupted.

“You wrote that music?” she had asked; and he had assented with an absent “Yes.”

At last they reached the house. Automatically half, reduced to sub-sensations, he followed her up the stairs to the little drawing-room where she had received him that first afternoon; after his dreary vigil in the Park, his happy questioning of Carter-Page.

Here a light supper was laid out, upon a table just large enough to accommodate the two of them.

“I am rather hungry,” said the Countess, handing over wraps and outer encumbrances to her maid. “You need not sit up for me, nor need Mason—Mrs. Hodgson has a key,” she added, dismissing the girl.

“Good-night, madam.”

“Good-night.”

Harvey and the Countess were alone.

The moment that Merceron was awaiting had at last arrived, when he must tell her the bitter truth and beg forgiveness. Pale, very pale, yet set and determined, he now stood before her.

She was watching him, reading between the lines on his face; and, tender as always, was swift to put him out of initial misery, to break the ice-bound silences from which he must emerge.

“Harvey,” she gently observed, “you have said nothing to me for hours—and you want to.”

The ice was broken.

He had seated himself, was leaning forward, elbow on knee, supporting his head with the clenched hand that was pressed against his cheek. Suffering was on the face he exposed, yet resignation also; once more he was master in his own house.

The Countess remained standing; looked down upon him, an arm resting above the unlit fireplace.

“I have come back with you, to ask your forgiveness,” said Harvey, “to ask you to forget.”

There was no halting in his voice, no hesitation; rather an added clearness, a roundness of tone consistent with the weight of what he uttered.

Her eyes bade him continue.

“To ask your forgiveness,” he repeated, “to ask you to forget. I first met you at a masked ball, and I have been masquerading ever since.”

Her eyes were still upon his face, unmoved, unsaddened.

“Not intentionally, believe me, nor consciously,” he continued; “I, too, was deceived by my disguise, believed in it with you. I thought that I really was the man you have known. It was a mistake, and I have misled you as well; you whom I love, whom I shall always love.”

He paused, checking the passion that the thought, the actuality, had brought forth; then, resuming:

“I imagined that I was able to live the life we have been leading, that I could belong to your world. I have made a mistake, have led you to share in it. I have been deceiving you all, myself as well—have been assuming the man of fashion, the idler. I am not as I pretended; but a common workman, an ordinary labourer, artist if you will; neither fashionable nor leisured.”

Her eyes showed no wincing, were tranquil as before. She listened, changing no line of the face turned to his own, without visible emotion; as though she had already heard his words and answered them, long ago—long ago.

“Come back to the beginning with me,” he continued, “and you will understand, perhaps pardon me?”

His voice was lower now, had sunk by several keys, when he resumed:

“I wrote to-night’s opera. This was the work I had undertaken, had willingly slaved at, had shut myself up with, for those three years. It was but barely finished the night I first met you and your world. How bright and joyous it all seemed to me, after my years of solitude, you can well imagine. I had gone out that night, my mind perfectly free, no haunting sense of work waiting and unfinished, the first time for many months. London was new to me, a revelation. We dined in town and went to the Opera afterwards. I had seen no people like those around me for years. And then came the Stoke ball. I met you there; you, the representative, the embodiment of this beautiful world which I had just discovered. I went home that night forgetful of all else, and bent on following, on giving up the old ambitions—vain, unsubstantial, frivolous, they seemed, beside the reality of the existence I had just witnessed.”

His voice was lower now; yet fuller and more vibrant than before, had deepened as the heart beyond had deepened, opened wider; as the thought expressed, the feelings exposed, were the more and more reserved, secret, and inward. And she, silent, motionless, was still looking down upon him with gaze untroubled.

“I went home that night, ardent, intoxicated, resolved on joining you,” he had continued; “ resolved on beginning my life afresh, on making it as yours,—on devoting every gift, every possession, to this new service. So I willed. For hours I revelled further, planning, anticipating; vaingloriously measuring my zest, my strength and aptitude. And to make this new course the more secure, to complete this utter severance from my former state, I hastened to destroy my opera. Thus would the previous years be quite obliterated and laid waste, all they held, their promise — return would be impossible. I determined to burn this work of mine, but instead, discovered that, during my absence, it had been stolen. My music had disappeared. The incident almost amused me, for the thief had but saved me trouble; my opera was to all intents and purposes destroyed. So I fancied. I was free, my life contained but that day!

“The rest you have seen, have shared in; how well I played my part—deceiving you, deceiving myself,—with what double-edged success I spread illusion, you know. Then came to-night. To-night, when this music I thought to have escaped confronted me, ghostlike, admonishing, recalling my former self, my real, my only self; returned, awakened me to the truth. Told me that I was masquerading, that my place was not that of idle listener and drone. That I was made for work, that I had in me a certain coarseness, a hardness, a brutality, a something different from the people amongst whom I was living; a latent force, concealed, dormant all this time or struggled against—till to-night, when it seemed to break loose, to overpower me, claiming me for another destiny than the one I had willed. And I must follow—must follow!”

His voice was heavy now, dull, with its sense of the inevitable, and worn with struggle. He continued, with an effort:

“I must follow. I do not belong here; my place is outside. I must give up everything.

The middle course is to be a Sopwith. It seems almost as though Providence had arranged this theft, then flung my work back at me—a call, a call!”

Memories were these words of what had filled him during his escape from the crowded Opera House; his jaded mind could encompass no more. Her first movement, a step towards him made audible by the rustle of her gown, he instinctively met, as one of protest; attempted a reply, with feeble parryings, lamed echoes of what had gone before.

“ This is stronger than I am,” he repeated; “I must go utterly away and work . . . and you whom I have cheated and betrayed ., . will you not try to forgive me, to forget me? . . . It seems almost as though Providence is forcing me, has called to me ...”

“Yes, Harvey, yes; but you have only heard half!” she interposed.

He looked up into her face, met her eyes fully for the first time since he had entered. He looked up into her face, expecting blows; but, instead, she was radiant with tears and smiles, a penetrating happiness.

“Harvey, my poor boy, I am so glad—so glad!”

She had come over to him, knelt before him, with those strangely bright eyes of hers opposite to his own. Her cool hands soothed his aching forehead. What did this mean? But she gave him no time to explain this reversal of all forebodings, to follow his vague misgivings.

“I am so glad, Harvey! I was waiting for this; I have watched for this; I knew it was coming! It is what I have hoped for, longed for, all the time,—and I am so happy!”

The perplexity that crossed his face was answered by:

“Do I not love yon, Harvey; and does not love know and feel and see everything? Did you think you could hide anything from me? Oh, Harvey, I knew all you have told me to-nght, knew it all long ago—almost from the first! I knew that you were not made for this kind of life—have I not said as much to you time and time again? But you were too happy to understand then. And, Harvey dear, what if you do work! Do you think that I could love an idle man, a man of no ambitions? I knew that you were a common labourer, an ordinary workman—perhaps that is why I loved you. Oh, Harvey, do you think that I am content with these husks, that I am content to dodder through life with empty hands? No, dear, I too am stifling! And we are going out into the free air together, to work and to share, to help each other. You will want help, and you will want love—as I, Harvey, as 1!”

Her words came to him warm, glowing, reviving his spent forces with their generous heat. His hands stole over hers as she continued :

“We will not part now,” she said, “and dear, my poor tired Harvey, you have only half understood it all. Do you not see what the last nine months mean? ” she asked, “what they have done for you, why they were necessary? Do you not see that without me, without these nine months, you would still be what you were—the man who wrote to-night’s music, the man who failed? Who failed because he knew nothing of real men and women, nothing about himself. And now, dear, we know these things. And to-morrow, the new man, the man that these nine months, that I have made of you—yes, I, Harvey,” she triumphantly repeated,—“this new m n goes back to work. Different work from that we heard to-night, eh, Harvey?”

He drew her gently to him. “You have forgiven me?” he asked; then added, “I was inside it all, and it is so difficult to see things clearly when one is inside.”

He understood now, saw his life as a whole at last.

A minute later, holding her in his arms, he said:

“Darling, it seems almost as though we had been utter strangers until to-night.”

TO-DAY.

MERCERON’S first opera, The Sultan of Shagpat, has, as you are doubtless aware, made triumphal progress round the two hemispheres. The British composer has at length emerged from obscurity, and the nations are loud with acclamation. The unexpected has again happened. As for Harvey, he takes his honours lightly, and ponders further conquests. Mrs. Merceron—for the yellow domino has put aside her titles—lately presented him with a daughter. The child’s name is Isabella.

Sopwith, snug in his Bayswater flat, has bravely overcome defeat. His songs are conspicuous in the shop-windows. He paid seventeen pence in the pound. As the hero of a late courageous, yet ill-fated attempt, he supports his position with a certain mournful dignity very edifying to the spectator. “The race is not always to the strong,” his graceful comment upon the news of Harvey’s first success, charmed a large and influential circle, besides implying a generous acceptance of the situation created.

And of all the diversified, the momentous events and struggles recently traversed, of this whole dance-of-life which he himself put into motion, saving a bald and unconvincing outline, Hutchinson, the instrument, Hutchinson, the original instigator and responsible head, knows nothing, absolutely nothing!

THE END.