. There was no general conversation until Mr.
Thurwell entered, and then dinner was announced almost immediately.

There was no lack of conversation then. At first it had lain chiefly
between Mr. Thurwell and Sir Allan Beaumerville, but catching a somewhat
anxious glance from Helen, her lover suddenly threw off his silence.
"When Maddison talks," one of his admirers had once said, "everyone else
listens"; and if that was not quite so in the present case, it was
simply because he had the art of drawing whoever he chose into the
conversation, and making them appear far greater sharers in it than they
really were. What was in truth a monologue seemed to be a brilliantly
sustained conversation, in which Maddison himself was at once the
promoter and the background. On his part there was not a single faulty
phrase or unmusical expression. Every idea he sprang upon them was
clothed in picturesque garb, and artistically conceived. It was the
outpouring of a richly stored, cultured mind--the perfect expression of
perfect matter.

The talk had drifted toward Italy, and the art of the Renaissance. Mr.
Thurwell had made some remark upon the picturesque beauties of some of
the lesser-known towns in the north, and Bernard Maddison had taken up
the theme with a new enthusiasm.

"I am but just come back from such a one," he said. "I wonder if I could
describe it."

And he did describe it. He told them of the crumbling palaces, beautiful
in their perfect Venetian architecture, but still more beautiful now in
their slow, grand decay, in which was all the majesty of deep repose
teeming with suggestions of past glories. He spoke of the still, clear
air, the delicate tints of the softened landscape, the dark cool green
of the olive trees, the green vineyards, and the dim blue hills. He
tried to make them understand the sweet silence, the pastoral simplicity
of the surrounding country, delicate and airy when the faint sunlight of
early morning lay across its valleys and sloping vineyards, rich and
drowsy and languorous when the full glow of midday or the scented
darkness of the starlit night succeeded. Then he passed on to speak of
that garden--the fairest wilderness it was possible to conceive--where
the violets grew like weeds upon the moss-grown paths, and brilliant
patches of wild geraniums mingled their perfume with the creamy clematis
run wild, and the clustering japonica.

"She who lives there," he went on more slowly, turning fr