er come in time for lunch at one o'clock."

Rickman's hand trembled as he answered that letter. All evening he
said to himself, "To-morrow I shall see Fielding"; and the beating of
his heart kept him awake until the dawn of the wonderful day. And as
he dressed he said to himself, "To-day I shall see Fielding." That he
should see him was enough. He could hardly bear to think what Fielding
had to say to him.

He had risen early, so as to go down into Surrey on his bicycle.
About noon he struck into the long golden road that goes straight
across the high moor where the great poet had built him a house.
Inside his gates, a fork of the road sloped to the shore of a large
lake fringed with the crimson heather. The house stood far back on a
flat stretch of moor, that looked as if it had been cut with one sweep
of a gigantic scythe from the sheltering pine-woods.

He saw Fielding far off, standing at the door of his house to welcome
him. Fielding was seventy-five and he looked sixty. A strong straight
figure, not over tall nor over slender, wearing, sanely but loosely,
the ordinary dress of an English gentleman. A head with strong
straight features, masses of white hair that hid the summit of the
forehead, a curling moustache and beard, close-clipped, showing the
line of the mouth still red as in his youth. A head to be carved in
silver or bronze, its edges bitten by time, like the edges of an
antique bust or coin.

"So you've come, have you?" was his greeting which the grasp of his
hand made friendly.

He took Rickman straight into his study, where a lady sat writing at a
table in the window.

"First of all," said he, "I must introduce you to Miss Gurney, who
introduced you to me."

Miss Gurney rose and held out a slender feverish hand. She did not
smile (her face narrowed so abruptly below her cheekbones that there
was hardly room for a smile on it), but her eyes under their thick
black brows turned on him an eager gaze.

Her eyes, he thought, were too piercing to be altogether friendly. He
wondered whether it was the flame in them that had consumed her face
and made it so white and small.

She made a few unremarkable remarks and turned again to her writing
table.

"Yes, Gertrude, you may go."

Her sallow nervous hands had already begun gathering up her work in
preparation for the word that banished her. When it came she smiled
(by some miracle), and went.

They had a little while to wait before luncheon. The