impossible.  He might have managed it by applying to her through Edward Wallace, but that he was unwilling to do, for various reasons.  He told himself that, after all, it was better to let her little note and his answer close his relations with her for the present.  Everywhere else but in the theatre she might still regard him as her friend; but there they could not but be antagonistic in some degree one to another, and not even intellectually did Kendal wish just now to meet her on a footing of antagonism.

So, when Saturday night came, he passed the hours of Miss Bretherton’s triumph at a ministerial evening party, where it seemed to him that the air was full of her name and that half the guests were there as a pis-aller, because the Calliope could not receive them.  And yet he thought he noticed in the common talk about her that criticism of her as an actress was a good deal more general than it had been at the beginning of the season.  The little knot of persons with an opinion and reasons for it had gradually influenced the larger public.  Nevertheless, there was no abatement whatever of the popular desire to see her, whether on the stage or in society.  The engouement for her personally, for her beauty, and her fresh pure womanliness, showed no signs of yielding, and would hold out, Kendal thought, for some time, against a much stronger current of depreciation on the intellectual side than had as yet set in.

He laid down the Monday paper with a smile of self-scorn and muttered:  ’I should like to know how much she remembers by this time of the prig who lectured to her in Nuneham woods a week ago!’ In the evening his Pall Mall Gazette told him that Miss Bretherton had crossed the channel that morning, en route for Paris and Venice.  He fell to calculating the weeks which must elapse before his sister would be in Venice, and before he could hear of any meeting between her and the Bretherton party, and wound up his calculations by deciding that London was already hot and would soon be empty, and that, as soon as he could gather together certain books he was in want of, he would carry them and his proofs down into Surrey, refuse all invitations to country houses, and devote himself to his work.

Before he left he paid a farewell call to Mrs. Stuart, who gave him full and enthusiastic accounts of Isabel Bretherton’s last night, and informed him that her brother talked of following the Brethertons to Venice some time in August.

‘Albert,’ she said, speaking of her husband, ’declares that he cannot get away for more than three weeks, and that he must have some walking; so that, what we propose at present is to pick up Edward at Venice at the end of August, and move up all together into the mountains afterwards.  Oh, Mr. Kendal,’ she went on a little nervously, as if not quite knowing whether to attack the subject or not, ’it was devoted of you to throw yourself into the breach for