Evelyn went away to Mr. Enterwick, the solicitor Monsignor recommended, and the following month she sailed for America.

IV

Her pictures and furniture were on view at Christie’s in the early spring, and all Owen’s friends met each other in the rooms and on the staircase.

The pictures were to be sold on Saturday, the furniture, china, and enamels on the following Monday.

“The pictures don’t matter so much, although her own portrait is going to be sold.  But the furniture!  Dear God, look at that brute trying the springs of the sofa where I have sat so often with her.  And there is the chair on which I used to sit listening to her when she sang.  And her piano—­why, my God, she is selling her piano!—­ What is to become of that woman?  A singer who sells her piano!”

“My dear friend, I suppose she had to sell everything or nothing?”

“But she’ll have to buy another piano, and she might have kept the one I gave her.  It is extraordinary how religion hardens the heart, Harding.  Do you see that fellow, a great nose, lumpy shoulders, trousers too short for him, a Hebrew barrel of grease—­Rosental.  You know him; I bought that clock from him.  He’s looking into it to see if anything has been broken, if it is in as good condition as when he sold it.  The brutes have all joined the ‘knock-out,’ and there—­”

As he said these words young Mr. Rowe, who believed himself to be connected with society, and who dealt largely in pictures, without, however, descending to the vulgarity of shop-keeping (he would resent being called a picture-dealer), approached and insisted on Sir Owen listening to the story of his difficulties with some county councillors who could not find the money to build an art gallery.

“But I object to your immortality being put on the rates.”

“You write books, Mr. Harding; I can’t.”

As soon as he left them, Harding, who knew the dealer kind, the original stock and the hybrid, told an amusing story of Mr. Rowe’s beginnings; and Owen forgot his sentimental trouble; but the story was interrupted by Lady Ascott coming down the room followed by her attendants, her literary and musical critics.

“Every one of them most interesting, I assure you, Sir Owen.  Mr. Homer has just returned from Italy—­”

“But I know Mr. Homer; we met long ago at Innes’ concerts.  If I am not mistaken you were writing a book then about Bellini.”

“Yes, ‘His Life and Works.’  I’ve just returned from Italy after two years’ reading in the public libraries.”

Lady Ascott’s musical critic was known to Owen by a small book he had written entitled “A Guide to the Ring.”  Before he was a Wagnerian he was the curator of a museum, and Owen remembered how desirous he was to learn the difference between Dresden and Chelsea china.  He had dabbled in politics and in journalism; he had collected hymns, ancient and modern, and Owen was not in the least surprised to hear that he had become the director of a shop for the sale of religious prints and statues, or that he had joined the Roman Church, and the group watched him slinking round on the arm of a young man, one who sang forty-nine songs by all the composers in Europe in exactly the same manner.