alled hansoms that lurched up, at the smooth broughams
that rolled away. When he turned round Mrs. St. George had disappeared;
her husband's voice rose to him from below--he was laughing and talking,
in the portico, with some lady who awaited her carriage. Paul had
solitary possession, for some minutes, of the warm deserted rooms where
the covered tinted lamplight was soft, the seats had been pushed about
and the odour of flowers lingered. They were large, they were pretty,
they contained objects of value; everything in the picture told of a
"good house." At the end of five minutes a servant came in with a
request from the Master that he would join him downstairs; upon which,
descending, he followed his conductor through a long passage to an
apartment thrown out, in the rear of the habitation, for the special
requirements, as he guessed, of a busy man of letters.

St. George was in his shirt-sleeves in the middle of a large high room--a
room without windows, but with a wide skylight at the top, that of a
place of exhibition. It was furnished as a library, and the serried
bookshelves rose to the ceiling, a surface of incomparable tone produced
by dimly-gilt "backs" interrupted here and there by the suspension of old
prints and drawings. At the end furthest from the door of admission was
a tall desk, of great extent, at which the person using it could write
only in the erect posture of a clerk in a counting-house; and stretched
from the entrance to this structure was a wide plain band of crimson
cloth, as straight as a garden-path and almost as long, where, in his
mind's eye, Paul at once beheld the Master pace to and fro during vexed
hours--hours, that is, of admirable composition. The servant gave him a
coat, an old jacket with a hang of experience, from a cupboard in the
wall, retiring afterwards with the garment he had taken off. Paul Overt
welcomed the coat; it was a coat for talk, it promised confidences--having
visibly received so many--and had tragic literary elbows. "Ah we're
practical--we're practical!" St. George said as he saw his visitor look
the place over. "Isn't it a good big cage for going round and round? My
wife invented it and she locks me up here every morning."

Our young man breathed--by way of tribute--with a certain oppression.
"You don't miss a window--a place to look out?"

"I did at first awfully; but her calculation was just. It saves time, it
has saved me many months in these ten