and told me so.'

Presently he asked to see his niece, and Darnell went out and prepared
Mary as well as he could. She could scarcely take in the news that her
aunt was a hopeless maniac, for Mrs. Nixon, having been extremely stupid
all her days, had naturally succeeded in passing with her relations as
typically sensible. With the Reynolds family, as with the great majority
of us, want of imagination is always equated with sanity, and though
many of us have never heard of Lombroso we are his ready-made converts.
We have always believed that poets are mad, and if statistics
unfortunately show that few poets have really been inhabitants of
lunatic asylums, it is soothing to learn that nearly all poets have had
whooping-cough, which is doubtless, like intoxication, a minor madness.

'But is it really true?' she asked at length. 'Are you certain uncle is
not deceiving you? Aunt seemed so sensible always.'

She was helped at last by recollecting that Aunt Marian used to get up
very early of mornings, and then they went into the drawing-room and
talked to the old man. His evident kindliness and honesty grew upon
Mary, in spite of a lingering belief in her aunt's fables, and when he
left, it was with a promise to come to see them again.

Mrs. Darnell said she felt tired, and went to bed; and Darnell returned
to the garden and began to pace to and fro, collecting his thoughts. His
immeasurable relief at the intelligence that, after all, Mrs. Nixon was
not coming to live with them taught him that, despite his submission,
his dread of the event had been very great. The weight was removed, and
now he was free to consider his life without reference to the grotesque
intrusion that he had feared. He sighed for joy, and as he paced to and
fro he savoured the scent of the night, which, though it came faintly
to him in that brick-bound suburb, summoned to his mind across many
years the odour of the world at night as he had known it in that short
sojourn of his boyhood; the odour that rose from the earth when the
flame of the sun had gone down beyond the mountain, and the afterglow
had paled in the sky and on the fields. And as he recovered as best he
could these lost dreams of an enchanted land, there came to him other
images of his childhood, forgotten and yet not forgotten, dwelling
unheeded in dark places of the memory, but ready to be summoned forth.
He remembered one fantasy that had long haunted him. As he lay half
asleep in th