on earlier days still, he would not, like Falkland, have died ingeminating peace; he would have fought; but on which side, no friend of his—­up till now—­could have been quite sure.  To have the reputation of an idler, and to be in truth a plodding and unwearied student; this, at any rate, pleased him.  To avow an enthusiasm, or an affection, generally seemed to him an indelicacy; only two or three people in the world knew what was the real quality of his heart.  Yet no man feigns shirking without in some measure learning to shirk; and there were certain true indolences and sybaritisms in Ashe of which he was fully and contemptuously aware, without either wishing or feeling himself able to break the yoke of them.

At the present moment, however, he was rather conscious of much unusual stirring and exaltation of personality.  As he stood looking out into the English night the currents of his blood ran free and fast.  Never had he felt the natural appetite for living so strong in him, combined with what seemed to be at once a divination of coming change, and a thirst for it.  Was it the mere advancement of his fortunes—­or something infinitely subtler and sweeter?  It was as though waves of softness and of yearning welled up from some unknown source, seeking an object and an outlet.

As he stood there dreaming, he suddenly became conscious of sounds in the room overhead.  Or rather in the now absolute stillness of the rest of the house he realized that the movements and voices above him, which had really been going on since he entered his room, persisted when everything else had died away.

Two people were talking; or rather one voice ran on perpetually, broken at intervals by the other.  He began to suspect to whom the voice belonged; and as he did so, the window above his own was thrown open.  He stepped back involuntarily, but not before he had caught a few words in French, spoken apparently by Lady Kitty.

“Ciel! what a night!—­and how the flowers smell!  And the stars—­I adore the stars!  Mademoiselle—­come here!  Mademoiselle! answer me—­I won’t tell tales—­now do you—­really and truly—­believe in God?”

A laugh, which was a laugh of pleasure, ran through Ashe, as he hurriedly put out his lights.

“Tormentor!” he said to himself—­“must you put a woman through her theological paces at this time of night?  Can’t you go to sleep, you little whirlwind?—­What’s to be done?  If I shut my window the noise will scare her.  But I can’t stand eavesdropping here.”

He withdrew softly from the window and began to undress.  But Lady Kitty was leaning out, and her voice carried amazingly.  Heard in this way also, apart from form and face, it became a separate living thing.  Ashe stood arrested, his watch that he was winding up in his hand.  He had known the voice till now as something sharp and light, the sign surely of a chatterer and a flirt.  To-night, as Kitty made use of it to expound her own peculiar theology to the French governess—­whereof a few fragments now and then floated down to Ashe—­nothing could have been more musical, melancholy, caressing.  A voice full of sex, and the spell of sex.