e beech-tree hid him from her sight; then she
opened the west windows, and the south wind that she had just let in
tried to rush out again by them, and in its passage it lifted up the
leaves of Mr. Rickman's catalogue and sent them flying. The last of
them, escaping playfully from her grasp, careered across the room and
hid itself under a window curtain. Stooping to recover it, she came
upon a long slip of paper printed on one side. It was signed S.K.R.,
and Savage Keith Rickman was the name she had seen on Mr. Rickman's
card. The headline, _Helen in Leuce_, drew her up with a little shock
of recognition. The title was familiar, so was the motto from
Euripides,

[Greek: su Dios ephus, o HElena thugater,]

and she read,

The wonder and the curse of friend and foe,
She watched the ranks of battle cloud and shine,
And heard, Achilles, that great voice of thine,
That thundered in the trenches far below.

Tears upon tears, woe upon mortal woe,
Follow her feet and funeral fire on fire,
While she, that phantom of the heart's desire,
Flies thither, where all dreams and phantoms go.

Oh Strength unconquerable, Achilles! Thee
She follows far into the shadeless land
Of Leuce, girdled by the gleaming sand,
Amidst the calm of an enchanted sea,
Where, children of the Immortals, hand in hand,
Ye share one golden immortality.

It was a voice from the sad modern world she knew so well, and in
spite of its form (which was a little too neo-classic and conventional
to please her) she felt it to be a cry from the heart of a living man.
That man she had identified with the boy her grandfather had found,
years ago, in a City bookshop. There had been no room for doubt on
that point when she saw him in the flush of his intellectual passion,
bursting so joyously, so preposterously, into Greek. He had,
therefore, already a certain claim on her attention. Besides, he
seemed to be undergoing some incomprehensible struggle which she
conceived to be of a moral nature, and she had been sorry for him on
that account.

But, if he were also--Was it possible that her grandfather's
marvellous boy had grown into her cousin's still more marvellous man?
Horace, too, had made his great discovery in a City shop. _Helen in
Leuce_ and a City shop--it hardly amounted to proof; but, if it did,
what then? Oh then, she was still more profoundly sorry for him. For
then he