twenty, was a great lady in
her way. Why shouldn't she patronize him, if she liked? And he smiled
again more irritatingly than ever. Nobody could be more irritating
than this Oxford don when he gave his mind to it.

"Lucy--if you only knew him, I don't think you'd suggest my bringing
him down here."

He was smiling still, while his imagination dallied with the monstrous
vision.

"I wouldn't have suggested it," she said coldly, "if I hadn't thought
you'd like it."

Horace felt a little ashamed of himself. He knew he had only to think
about Lucia in her presence to change the colour on her cheeks, and
his last thought had left a stain there like the mark of a blow. Never
had he known any woman so sensitive as his cousin Lucia.

"So I should like it, dear, if it were possible, or rather if _he_
were not impossible. His manners have not that repose which
distinguishes his _Helen_. Really, for two and twenty, he is
marvellously restrained."

"Restrained? Do you think so?"

"Certainly," he said, his thought gaining precision in opposition to
her vagueness, "his _Helen_ is pure Vere de Vere. You might read me
some of it."

She read, and in the golden afternoon her voice built up the cold,
polished marble of the verse. She had not been able to tell him what
she thought of Rickman; but her voice, in its profound vibrations,
made apparent that which she, and she only, had discerned in him, the
troubled pulse of youth, the passion of the imprisoned and tumultuous
soul, the soul which Horace had assured her inhabited the body of an
aitchless shopman. Lucia might not have the intuition of genius, but
she had the genius of intuition; she had seen what the great Oxford
critic had not been able to see.

The sound of the fiddling ceased as suddenly as it had begun; and over
the grey house and the green garden was the peace of heaven and of the
enfolding hills.

Jewdwine breathed a sigh of contentment at the close of the great
chorus in the second Act. After all, Rickman was the best antidote to
Rickman.

But Lucia was looking ardent again, as if she were about to speak.

"Don't, Lucy," he murmured.

"Don't what?"

"Don't talk any more about him now. It's too hot. Wait till the cool
of the evening."

"I thought you wanted me to play to you then."

Jewdwine looked at her; he noted the purity of her face, the beautiful
pose of her body, stretched in the deck-chair, her fine white hands
and arms that hung there, sle