hen he leaned and gazed, as now, at the
lovely evocations of the evening, it was like hearing dimly, from far
depths, the bells of the buried city ringing.

He was thinking of nothing as he leaned there, though memories, linked
in their associated loveliness, floated across his mind--larch-boughs
brushed exquisitely against a frosty sky on a winter morning in
Northumberland, when, a boy, with gun and dogs, he had paused on the
wooded slopes near his home to look round him; or the little well of
chill, clear water that he had found one summer day gushing from a mossy
source under a canopy of leaves; or the silver sky, and hills folded in
greys and purples, that had surrounded him on a day in late autumn when
he had walked for miles in loneliness and, again, had paused to look,
receiving the scene ineffaceably, so that certain moods always made it
rise before him. And linked by some thread of affinity with these
pictures, the face of the young girl he had met that afternoon rose
before him. Not as he had just seen her, but as he had seen her, for the
first time, the night before at the concert. Her face came back to him
with the larch-boughs and the spring of water and the lonely hills,
while he looked at London beneath him. She touched and interested him,
and appealed to something sub-conscious, as music did. But when he
passed from picturing her to thinking about her, about her origin and
environment and future, it was with much the same lucid and unmoved
insight with which he would have examined some unfortunate creature in
the witness-box.

Miss Woodruff seemed to him very unfortunate. For her irregular birth he
had contempt and for her haphazard upbringing only pity. He saw no place
in a well-ordered society for sculptors who ran away with other men's
wives and lived on chestnuts and left their illegitimate children to be
picked up at the roadside. He was the type of young man who,
theoretically, admitted of and indeed admired all independences in
women; practically he preferred them to be sheltered by their male
relatives and to read no French novels until they married--if then. Miss
Woodruff struck him as at once sheltered and exposed. Her niche under
the extended wing of the great woman seemed to him precarious. He saw no
real foothold for her in her present _milieu_. She only entered Mrs.
Forrester's orbit, that was evident, as a tiny satellite in attendance
on the streaming comet. In the wake of the comet she t