guests, accompanied the long-trained ladies to the door. It was a hot
night, the windows were open, the sound of the quick carriages and of the
linkmen's call came into the house. The affair had rather glittered; a
sense of festal things was in the heavy air: not only the influence of
that particular entertainment, but the suggestion of the wide hurry of
pleasure which in London on summer nights fills so many of the happier
quarters of the complicated town. Gradually Mrs. St. George's drawing-
room emptied itself; Paul was left alone with his hostess, to whom he
explained the motive of his waiting. "Ah yes, some intellectual, some
_professional_, talk," she leered; "at this season doesn't one miss it?
Poor dear Henry, I'm so glad!" The young man looked out of the window a
moment, at the called hansoms that lurched up, at the smooth broughams
that rolled away. When he turned round Mrs. St. George had disappeared;
her husband's voice rose to him from below--he was laughing and talking,
in the portico, with some lady who awaited her carriage. Paul had
solitary possession, for some minutes, of the warm deserted rooms where
the covered tinted lamplight was soft, the seats had been pushed about
and the odour of flowers lingered. They were large, they were pretty,
they contained objects of value; everything in the picture told of a
"good house." At the end of five minutes a servant came in with a
request from the Master that he would join him downstairs; upon which,
descending, he followed his conductor through a long passage to an
apartment thrown out, in the rear of the habitation, for the special
requirements, as he guessed, of a busy man of letters.

St. George was in his shirt-sleeves in the middle of a large high room--a
room without windows, but with a wide skylight at the top, that of a
place of exhibition. It was furnished as a library, and the serried
bookshelves rose to the ceiling, a surface of incomparable tone produced
by dimly-gilt "backs" interrupted here and there by the suspension of old