and predestined
harmony, he could only marry for love. Not for a great estate, for
Court House and the Harden Library. No, to do him justice, his seeking
of Lucia was independent of his reflection that these things would be
added unto him. Still, once married to Lucia, there was only Sir
Frederick and his infernal fiddle between him and ultimate, inviolable
possession; and Sir Frederick, to use his own phrase, had "about
played himself out." From what a stage and to what mad music!

From the east wing came the sound, not of his uncle's fiddle, but of
the music he desired, the tremendous and difficult music that, on a
hot July afternoon, taxed the delicate player's strength to its
utmost. Lucia began with Scarlatti and Bach; wandered off through
Schumann into Chopin, a moonlit enchanted wilderness of sound; paused,
and wound up superbly with Beethoven, the "Sonata Appassionata."

And as she came back to him over the green lawn she seemed to Jewdwine
to be trailing tumultuous echoes of her music; the splendour and the
passion of her playing hung about her like a luminous cloud. He rose
and went to meet her, and in his eyes there was a light, a light of
wonder and of worship.

"I think," she said, "you do look a little happier."

"I am tolerably happy, thanks."

"So am I."

"Yes, but _you_ don't look it. What are you thinking of?"

She turned, and they walked together towards the house.

"I was thinking--it's quite cool, now, Horace--of what you said--about
that friend of yours."

"Lucy! Was I rude? Did I make you unhappy?"

"Not you. Don't you see that it's just because I'm happy that I want
to be kind to him?"

"Just like your sweetness. But, dear child, you can't be kind to
everybody. It really doesn't do."

She said no more; she had certainly something else to think about.

That was on a Tuesday, a hot afternoon in July, eighteen ninety-one.

CHAPTER II

It was Wednesday evening in April, eighteen ninety-two. Spring was
coming up on the south wind from the river; spring was in the narrow
streets and in the great highway of the Strand, and in a certain
bookseller's shop in the Strand. And it was Easter, not to say Bank
Holiday, already in the soul of the young man who sat there compiling
the Quarterly Catalogue. For it was in the days of his obscurity.

The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with
a decorated facade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish