'I live here--at least for the present--name, Hampson--'

'Why, weren't you one of the first violins at the Savoy fifteen years
back?' asked Siegmund.

They chatted awhile about music. They had known each other, had been
fairly intimate, and had since become strangers. Hampson excused himself
for having addressed Siegmund:

'I saw you with your nose flattened against the window,' he said, 'and
as I had mine in the same position too, I thought we were fit to be
re-acquainted.'

Siegmund looked at the man in astonishment.

'I only mean you were staring rather hard at nothing. It's a pity to try
and stare out of a beautiful blue day like this, don't you think?'

'Stare beyond it, you mean?' asked Siegmund.

'Exactly!' replied the other, with a laugh of intelligence. 'I call a
day like this "the blue room". It's the least draughty apartment in all
the confoundedly draughty House of Life.'

Siegmund looked at him very intently. This Hampson seemed to express
something in his own soul.

'I mean,' the man explained, 'that after all, the great mass of life
that washes unidentified, and that we call death, creeps through the