more.  And now by an odd conjunction she found herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.

She thoughtfully rose from her chair and searched the apartment with the interest of a fellow-tradesman.  Yes, the volume of his own verse was among the rest.  Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the landlady, for some trivial service, and inquired again about the young man.

‘Well, I’m sure you’d be interested in him, ma’am, if you could see him, only he’s so shy that I don’t suppose you will.’  Mrs. Hooper seemed nothing loth to minister to her tenant’s curiosity about her predecessor.  ‘Lived here long?  Yes, nearly two years.  He keeps on his rooms even when he’s not here: the soft air of this place suits his chest, and he likes to be able to come back at any time.  He is mostly writing or reading, and doesn’t see many people, though, for the matter of that, he is such a good, kind young fellow that folks would only be too glad to be friendly with him if they knew him.  You don’t meet kind-hearted people every day.’

‘Ah, he’s kind-hearted . . . and good.’

‘Yes; he’ll oblige me in anything if I ask him.  “Mr. Trewe,” I say to him sometimes, “you are rather out of spirits.”  “Well, I am, Mrs. Hooper,” he’ll say, “though I don’t know how you should find it out.”  “Why not take a little change?” I ask.  Then in a day or two he’ll say that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and I assure you he comes back all the better for it.’

‘Ah, indeed!  His is a sensitive nature, no doubt.’

‘Yes.  Still he’s odd in some things.  Once when he had finished a poem of his composition late at night he walked up and down the room rehearsing it; and the floors being so thin—jerry-built houses, you know, though I say it myself—he kept me awake up above him till I wished him further . . . But we get on very well.’

This was but the beginning of a series of conversations about the rising poet as the days went on.  On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper drew Ella’s attention to what she had not noticed before: minute scribblings in pencil on the wall-paper behind the curtains at the head of the bed.

‘O! let me look,’ said Mrs. Marchmill, unable to conceal a rush of tender curiosity as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.

‘These,’ said Mrs. Hooper, with the manner of a woman who knew things, ‘are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses.  He has tried to rub most of them out, but you can read them still.  My belief is that he wakes up in the night, you know, with some rhyme in his head, and jots it down there on the wall lest he should forget it by the morning.  Some of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards in print in the magazines.  Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that one before.  It must have been done only a few days ago.’

‘O yes! . . . ’

Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished her companion would go away, now that the information was imparted.  An indescribable consciousness of personal interest rather than literary made her anxious to read the inscription alone; and she accordingly waited till she could do so, with a sense that a great store of emotion would be enjoyed in the act.

Perhaps because the sea was choppy outside the Island, Ella’s husband found it much pleasanter to go sailing and steaming about without his wife, who was a bad sailor, than with her.  He did not disdain to go thus alone on board the steamboats of the cheap-trippers, where there was dancing by moonlight, and where the couples would come suddenly down with a lurch into each other’s arms; for, as he blandly told her, the company was too mixed for him to take her amid such scenes.  Thus, while this thriving manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air out of his sojourn here, the life, external at least, of Ella was monotonous enough, and mainly consisted in passing a certain number of hours each day in bathing and walking up and down a stretch of shore.  But the poetic impulse having again waxed strong, she was possessed by an inner flame which left her hardly conscious of what was proceeding around her.

She had read till she knew by heart Trewe’s last little volume of verses, and spent a great deal of time in vainly attempting to rival some of them, till, in her failure, she burst into tears.  The personal element in the magnetic attraction exercised by this circumambient, unapproachable master of hers was so much stronger than the intellectual and abstract that she could not understand it.  To be sure, she was surrounded noon and night by his customary environment, which literally whispered of him to her at every moment; but he was a man she had never seen, and that all that moved her was the instinct to specialize a waiting emotion on the first fit thing that came to hand did not, of course, suggest itself to Ella.

In the natural way of passion under the too practical conditions which civilization has devised for its fruition, her husband’s love for her had not survived, except in the form of fitful friendship, any more than, or even so much as, her own for him; and, being a woman of very living ardours, that required sustenance of some sort, they were beginning to feed on this chancing material, which was, indeed, of a quality far better than chance usually offers.

One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet, whence, in their excitement, they pulled out some clothing.  Mrs. Hooper explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and hung it up in the closet again.  Possessed of her fantasy, Ella went later in the afternoon, when nobody was in that part of the house, opened the closet, unhitched one of the articles, a mackintosh, and put it on, with the waterproof cap belonging to it.

‘The mantle of Elijah!’ she said.  ‘Would it might inspire me to rival him, glorious genius that he is!’

Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned to look at herself in the glass.  His heart had beat inside that coat, and his brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought she would never reach.  The consciousness of her weakness beside him made her feel quite sick.  Before she had got the things off her the door opened, and her husband entered the room.

‘What the devil—’

She blushed, and removed them

‘I found them in the closet here,’ she said, ‘and put them on in a freak.  What have I else to do?  You are always away!’

‘Always away?  Well . . . ’

That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might herself have nourished a half-tender regard for the poet, so ready was she to discourse ardently about him.

‘You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma’am,’ she said; ‘and he has just sent to say that he is going to call to-morrow afternoon to look up some books of his that he wants, if I’ll be in, and he may select them from your room?’

‘O yes!’

‘You could very well meet Mr Trewe then, if you’d like to be in the way!’

She promised with secret delight, and went to bed musing of him.

Next morning her husband observed: ‘I’ve been thinking of what you said, Ell: that I have gone about a good deal and left you without much to amuse you.  Perhaps it’s true.  To-day, as there’s not much sea, I’ll take you with me on board the yacht.’

For the first time in her experience of such an offer Ella was not glad.  But she accepted it for the moment.  The time for setting out drew near, and she went to get ready.  She stood reflecting.  The longing to see the poet she was now distinctly in love with overpowered all other considerations.

‘I don’t want to go,’ she said to herself.  ‘I can’t bear to be away!  And I won’t go.’

She told her husband that she had changed her mind