to hear, he was engaged in writing music mainly, and had a piano all to himself in a little remote room beyond the dining-room, which looked out to the stable-yard and had formerly been an estate-office.  We used to hear faint sounds wafted down the garden when the wind was in the west.  He was friendly, but he had the absorption of the musician in his art, which is unlike all other artistic absorptions, because it seems literally to check the growth of other qualities and interests.  In fact, in many ways Lestrange was like a pious child.  He was apt to be snubbed by Father Payne, but he was wholly indifferent to all irony.  I used to listen to him playing the organ in the evenings, and a language of emotions and visions certainly streamed from his fingers which he was never able to put into words.  Father Payne treated him as one might treat an inspired fool, with a mixture of respect and sharpness.

Then there was Rose, a man of twenty-five, a curious mixture of knowledge, cynicism, energy, and affectionateness.  I found Rose a very congenial companion, though I never felt sure what he thought, and never aired my enthusiasms in his presence.  He had great aplomb, and was troubled by no shyness nor hesitation.  There was a touch of frostiness at times between him and Father Payne.  Rose was paradoxical and whimsical, and was apt to support fantastic positions with apparent earnestness.  But he was an extremely capable and sensible man, and had a knack of dropping his contentiousness the moment it began to give offence.  He was by far the most mundane of us, and had some command of money.  I used to fancy that Father Payne was a little afraid of him, when he displayed his very considerable knowledge of the world.  His father was a wealthy man, a member of Parliament, and Rose really knew social personages of the day.  I doubt if he was ever quite in sympathy with the idea of the place, but I used to feel that his presence was a wholesome sort of corrective, like the vinegar in the salad.  I believe he was writing a play, but he has done nothing since in literature, and was in many ways more like a visitor than an inmate.

Then came my friend Vincent, a solid, good-natured, hard-working man, with a real enthusiasm for literature, not very critical or even imaginative, but with a faculty for clear and careful writing.  He was at work on a realistic novel, which made some little reputation; but he has become since, what I think he always was meant to be, an able journalist and an excellent leader-writer on political and social topics.  Vincent was the most interested of all of us in current affairs, but at the same time had a quiet sort of enthusiasm, and a power of idealising people, ardently but unsentimentally, which made him the most loyal of friends.

The only other person of whom we saw anything was the Vicar of the parish—­a safe, decorous, useful man, a distant cousin of Father Payne’s.  His wife was a good-humoured and conventional woman.  Their two daughters were pleasant, unaffected girls, just come to womanhood.  Lestrange afterwards married one of them.