at him from afar—as if he had been a burning ship on the horizon—and simply murmured “Poor old Mark!”

“I hope you’re not anxious,” I as promptly pronounced.

“No, but I’m disappointed.  She won’t let me in.  She has locked the door, and I’m afraid to make a noise.”  I daresay there might have been a touch of the ridiculous in such a confession, but I liked my new friend so much that it took nothing for me from his dignity.  “She tells me—from behind the door—that she’ll let me know if he’s worse.”

“It’s very good of her,” said Miss Ambient with a hollow sound.

I had exchanged a glance with Mark in which it’s possible he read that my pity for him was untinged with contempt, though I scarce know why he should have cared; and as his sister soon afterward got up and took her bedroom candlestick he proposed we should go back to his study.  We sat there till after midnight; he put himself into his slippers and an old velvet jacket, he lighted an ancient pipe, but he talked considerably less than before.  There were longish pauses in our communion, but they only made me feel we had advanced in intimacy.  They helped me further to understand my friend’s personal situation and to imagine it by no means the happiest possible.  When his face was quiet it was vaguely troubled, showing, to my increase of interest—if that was all that was wanted!—that for him too life was the same struggle it had been for so many another man of genius.  At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my ineffable joy, he gave me some of the sheets of his forthcoming book—which, though unfinished, he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to writers of deliberation, of having “set up,” from chapter to chapter, as he advanced.  These early pages, the prémices, in the language of letters, of that new fruit of his imagination, I should take to my room and look over at my leisure.  I was in the act of leaving him when the door of the study noiselessly opened and Mrs. Ambient stood before us.  She observed us a moment, her candle in her hand, and then said to her husband that as she supposed he hadn’t gone to bed she had come down to let him know Dolcino was more quiet and would probably be better in the morning.  Mark Ambient made no reply; he simply slipped past her in the doorway, as if for fear she might seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs to judge for himself of his child’s condition.  She looked so frankly discomfited that I for a moment believed her about to give him chase.  But she resigned herself with a sigh and her eyes turned, ruefully and without a ray, to the lamplit room where various books at which I had been looking were pulled out of their places on the shelves and the fumes of tobacco hung in mid-air.  I bade her good-night and then, without intention, by a kind of fatality, a perversity that had already made me address her overmuch on that question of her husband’s powers, I alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had entrusted me and which I nursed there under my arm.  “They’re the opening chapters of his new book,” I said.  “Fancy my satisfaction at being allowed to carry them to my room!”

She turned away, leaving me to take my candlestick from the table in the hall; but before we separated, thinking it apparently a good occasion to let me know once for all since I was beginning, it would seem, to be quite “thick” with my host—that there was no fitness in my appealing to her for sympathy in such a case; before we separated, I say, she remarked to me with her quick fine well-bred inveterate curtness: “I daresay you attribute to me ideas I haven’t got.  I don’t take that sort of interest in my husband’s proof-sheets.  I consider his writings most objectionable!”

III

I had an odd colloquy the next morning with Miss Ambient, whom I found strolling in the garden before breakfast.  The whole place looked as fresh and trim, amid the twitter of the birds, as if, an hour before, the housemaids had been turned into it with their dust-pans and feather-brushes.  I almost hesitated to light a cigarette and was doubly startled when, in the act of doing so, I suddenly saw the sister of my host, who had, at the best, something of the weirdness of an apparition, stand before me.  She might have been posing for her photograph.  Her sad-coloured robe arranged itself in serpentine folds at her feet; her hands locked themselves listlessly together in front; her chin rested on a cinque-cento ruff.  The first thing I did after bidding her good-morning was to ask her for news of her little nephew—to express the hope she had heard he was better.  She was able to gratify this trust—she spoke as if we might expect to see him during the day.  We walked through the shrubberies together and she gave me further light on her brother’s household, which offered me an opportunity to repeat to her what his wife had so startled and distressed me with the night before.  Was it the sorry truth that she thought his productions objectionable?

“She doesn’t usually come out with that so soon!” Miss Ambient returned in answer to my breathlessness.

“Poor lady,” I pleaded, “she saw I’m a fanatic.”

“Yes, she won’t like you for that.  But you mustn’t mind, if the rest of us like you!  Beatrice thinks a work of art ought to have a ‘purpose.’  But she’s a charming woman—don’t you think her charming?  I find in her quite the grand air.”

“She’s very beautiful,” I produced with an effort; while I reflected that though it was apparently true that Mark Ambient was mismated it was also perceptible that his sister was perfidious.  She assured me her brother and his wife had no other difference but this—one that she thought his writings immoral and his influence pernicious.  It was a fixed idea; she was afraid of these things for the child.  I answered that it was in all conscience enough, the trifle of a woman’s regarding her husband’s mind as a well of corruption, and she seemed much struck with the novelty of my remark.  “But there hasn’t been any of the sort of trouble that there so often is among married people,” she said.  “I suppose you can judge for yourself that Beatrice isn’t at all—well, whatever they call it when a woman kicks over!  And poor Mark doesn’t make love to other people either.  You might think he would, but I assure you he doesn’t.  All the same of course, from her point of view, you know, she has a dread of my brother’s influence on the child on the formation of his character, his ‘ideals,’ poor little brat, his principles.  It’s as if it were a subtle poison or a contagion—something that would rub off on his tender sensibility when his father kisses him or holds him on his knee.  If she could she’d prevent Mark from even so much as touching him.  Every one knows it—visitors see it for themselves; so there’s no harm in my telling you.  Isn’t it excessively odd?  It comes from Beatrice’s being so religious and so tremendously moral—so à cheval on fifty thousand riguardi.  And then of course we mustn’t forget,” my companion added, a little unexpectedly, to this polyglot proposition, “that some of Mark’s ideas are—well, really—rather impossible, don’t you know?”

I reflected as we went into the house, where we found Ambient unfolding The Observer at the breakfast-table, that none of them were probably quite so “impossible, don’t you know?” as his sister.  Mrs. Ambient, a little “the worse,” as was mentioned, for her ministrations, during the night, to Dolcino, didn’t appear at breakfast.  Her husband described her, however, as hoping to go to church.  I afterwards learnt that she did go, but nothing naturally was less on the cards than that we should accompany her.  It