And then, how was she to receive it?  Needless to say, there was nothing to be hoped from the post; and I should have said before that Tyre and Sidon face each other on opposite sides of the river, and that my home was in Sidon, three miles from the ferry.

Likewise, it was now nearing three in the morning.  Just time to catch the half-past three boat, run up to the theatre, a mile away, and meet the return boat.  So down down through the creaking house, gingerly, as though I were a Jason picking my way among the coils of the sleeping dragon.  Soon I was shooting along the phantom streets, like Mercury on a message through Hades.

At last the river came in sight, growing slate-colour in the earliest dawn.  I could see the boat nuzzling up against the pier, and snoring in its sleep.  I said to myself that this was Styx and the fare an obolus.  As I jumped on board, with hot face and hotter heart, Charon clicked his signal to the engines, the boat slowly snuffled itself half awake, and we shoved out into the sleepy water.

As we crossed, the light grew, and the gas-lamps of Tyre beaconed with fading gleam.  Overhead began a restlessness in the clouds, as of a giant drowsily shuffling off some of his bedclothes; but as yet he slept, and only the silver bosom of his spouse the moon was uncovered.

When we landed, the streets of Tyre were already light, but empty:  as though they had got up early to meet some one who had not arrived.  I sped through them like a seagull that has the harbour to itself, and was not long in reaching the theatre.  How desolate the playbills looked that had been so companionable but two or three hours before.  And there was her photograph!  Surely it was an omen.  Ah, my angel!  See, I am bringing you my heart in a song ‘All my heart in this my singing!’

I dropped the letter into the box:  but, as I turned away, momentarily glancing up the long street, I caught sight of an approaching figure that could hardly be mistaken.  Good Heavens! it was David, and he too was carrying a letter.

SANDRA BELLONI’S PINEWOOD

(TO THE SWEET MEMORY OF FRANCES WYNNE)

I felt jaded and dusty, I needed flowers and sunshine; and remembering that some one had told me—­erroneously, I have since discovered!—­that the pinewood wherein Sandra Belloni used to sing to her harp, like a nixie, in the moonlit nights, lay near Oxshott in Surrey, I vowed myself there and then to the Meredithian pilgrimage.

The very resolution uplifted me with lyric gladness, and I went swinging out of the old Inn where I live with the heart of a boy.  Across Lincoln’s Inn Fields, down by the Law Courts, and so to Waterloo.  I felt I must have a confidante, so I told the slate-coloured pigeons in the square where I was off—­out among the thrushes, the broom, and the may.  But they wouldn’t come.  They evidently deemed that a legal purlieu was a better place for ‘pickings.’