arm-chairs warming in the blaze. Mrs. Hilbery stood
over the fire, with one foot on the fender, and her skirts slightly
raised.

"Oh, Katharine," she exclaimed, "how you've made me think of Mamma and
the old days in Russell Square! I can see the chandeliers, and the
green silk of the piano, and Mamma sitting in her cashmere shawl by
the window, singing till the little ragamuffin boys outside stopped to
listen. Papa sent me in with a bunch of violets while he waited round
the corner. It must have been a summer evening. That was before things
were hopeless...."

As she spoke an expression of regret, which must have come frequently to
cause the lines which now grew deep round the lips and eyes, settled on
her face. The poet's marriage had not been a happy one. He had left his
wife, and after some years of a rather reckless existence, she had
died, before her time. This disaster had led to great irregularities
of education, and, indeed, Mrs. Hilbery might be said to have escaped
education altogether. But she had been her father's companion at the
season when he wrote the finest of his poems. She had sat on his knee in
taverns and other haunts of drunken poets, and it was for her sake, so
people said, that he had cured himself of his dissipation, and become
the irreproachable literary character that the world knows, whose
inspiration had deserted him. As Mrs. Hilbery grew old she thought more
and more of the past, and this ancient disaster seemed at times almost
to prey upon her mind, as if she could not pass out of life herself
without laying the ghost of her parent's sorrow to rest.

Katharine wished to comfort her mother, but it was difficult to do this
satisfactorily when the facts themselves were so much of a legend. The
house in Russell Square, for example, with its noble rooms, and the
magnolia-tree in the garden, and the sweet-voiced piano, and the sound
of feet coming down the corridors, and other properties of size and
romance--had they any existence? Yet why should Mrs. Alardyce live all
alone in this gigantic mansion, and, if she did not live alone, with
whom did she live? For its own sake, Katharine rather liked this tragic
story, and would have been glad to hear the details of it, and to have
been able to discuss them frankly. But this it became less and less
possible to do, for though Mrs. Hilbery was constantly reverting to the
story, it was always in this tentative and restless fashion, as though
by a tou