sensation of pleasure, the small yellow flames lick the crumpled paper and curl upward.  Rising after a moment, she stood breathing in the soft twilight-coloured atmosphere she loved.  The place was her own and she kept it carefully guarded from a too garish daylight, while the beloved familiar objects—­the shining rows of books, the dull greenish hangings, the costly cushioned easy-chairs, the few rare photographs, the spacious writing table and the single Venetian vase of flowers—­were always steeped in a softly shadowed half-tone of light.

As she looked about her the comfort of the room entered into her like warmth, and, opening her arms in a happy gesture, she threw herself among the pillows of the couch and lay watching the rapid yellow flames.  Even in the midst of her musing she laughed suddenly to find that she was thinking of the phrase with which Funsten had dismissed the name of Arnold Kemper:  “The only favourable thing one can say of him is to say nothing.”  Was it really so bad as that she wondered, with a dim memory that somewhere, back in an obscure corner of her bookshelves, lay his first thin, promising volume published now almost fifteen years ago.  Rising presently, she began a hasty search among a collection of little novels which had been banished ignominiously from the light of day, and, coming at last upon the story, she brought it to the lamp and commenced a reading prompted solely by the moment’s impetuous curiosity.  Utterly devoid as it was of literary finish or discerning craftsmanship, the book gripped from the start by sheer audacity—­by its dominant, insistent, almost brutal and entirely misdirected power.  It was less the story that struck one than the personal equation between the lines, and the impression she brought away from her breathless skimming was that she had encountered the shock of a tremendous masculine force.

Her head fell back upon the cushions, and she lost herself in the vague wonder the book aroused.  Life was there—­the life of the flesh, of vivid sensation, of experience that ran hot and swift.  The active principle, so strong in the predestined artist, stirred suddenly in her breast, and she felt the instant of blind terror which comes with the realisation of the fleeting possibilities of earth.  Outside—­beyond her—­existence in its multitudinous forms, its diversity of colour, swept on like some vast caravan from which she had been detached and set apart.  Lying there she heard the call of it, that tremendous music which shook through her and loosened a caged voice within herself.  Her own poetry became for her but a little part of the tumultuous, passionate instinct for life within her—­for life not as it was in its reality but as she saw it transfigured and enkindled by the imagination that lives in dreams.

Suddenly from the darkened silence of the house below a thin sound rose trembling, and then, gaining strength, penetrated into the closed chambers.  Uncle Percival was at his flute again; he had arisen in the night to resume his impassioned piping; and, rising hurriedly, Laura lit her candle and went out into the hall, where a streak of light beneath Angela’s door ran like a white thread across the blackness.  Listening a moment, she heard inside the nervous pacing to and fro of tired yet restless feet, and after a short hesitation she turned the knob and entered.