l drawings, he could feel
her looking at him, as animals do when they are making up their minds
whether or no to like you; then she came and stood so close that her arm
pressed his. He redoubled his efforts to find something good about the
drawings. But in truth there was nothing good. And if, in other matters,
he could lie well enough to save people's feelings, where Art was
concerned he never could; so he merely said:

"You haven't been taught, you see."

"Will you teach me?"

But before he could answer, she was already effacing that naive question
in her most grown-up manner.

"Of course I oughtn't to ask. It would bore you awfully."

After that he vaguely remembered Dromore's asking if he ever rode in the
Row; and those eyes of hers following him about; and her hand giving
his another childish squeeze. Then he was on his way again down
the dimly-lighted stairs, past an interminable array of Vanity Fair
cartoons, out into the east wind.

III

Crossing the Green Park on his way home, was he more, or less, restless?
Difficult to say. A little flattered, certainly, a little warmed; yet
irritated, as always when he came into contact with people to whom the
world of Art was such an amusing unreality. The notion of trying to
show that child how to draw--that feather-pate, with her riding and her
kitten; and her 'Perdita' eyes! Quaint, how she had at once made
friends with him! He was a little different, perhaps, from what she was
accustomed to. And how daintily she spoke! A strange, attractive, almost
lovely child! Certainly not more than seventeen--and--Johnny Dromore's
daughter!

The wind was bitter, the lamps bright among the naked trees. Beautiful
always--London at night, even in January, even in an east wind, with
a beauty he never tired of. Its great, dark, chiselled shapes, its
gleaming lights, like droves of flying stars come to earth; and all
warmed by the beat and stir of innumerable lives--those lives that he
ached so to know and to be part of.

He told Sylvia of his encounter. Dromore! The name struck her. She
had an old Irish song, 'The Castle of Dromore,' with a queer, haunting
refrain.

It froze hard all the week, and he began a life-size group of their two
sheep-dogs. Then a thaw set in with that first south-west wind,
which brings each February a feeling of Spring such as is never again
recaptured, and men's senses, like sleepy bees in the sun, go roving.
It awakened in him more violently