After dinner he would light an immense brown meerschaum pipe, and smoke for a quarter-hour or so in silence; then he would play a game or two of chess with some one; and by and by he would open his piano, and sing to us till midnight.

IV.

I speak of him as old, and indeed we always called him Old Childe among ourselves; yet he was barely fifty.  Nina, when I first made her acquaintance, must have been a girl of sixteen or seventeen; though—­tall, with an amply-rounded, mature-seeming figure—­if one had judged from her appearance, one would have fancied her three or four years older.  For that matter, she looked then very much as she looks now; I can perceive scarcely any alteration.  She had the same dark hair, gathered up in a big smooth knot behind, and breaking into a tumult of little ringlets over her forehead; the same clear, sensitive complexion; the same rather large, full-lipped mouth, tip-tilted nose, soft chin, and merry mischievous eyes.  She moved in the same way, with the same leisurely, almost lazy grace, that could, however, on occasions, quicken to an alert, elastic vivacity; she had the same voice, a trifle deeper than most women’s, and of a quality never so delicately nasal, which made it racy and characteristic; the same fresh ready laughter.  There was something arch, something a little sceptical, a little quizzical in her expression, as if, perhaps, she were disposed to take the world, more or less, with a grain of salt; at the same time there was something rich, warm-blooded, luxurious, suggesting that she would know how to savour its pleasantnesses with complete enjoyment.  But if you felt that she was by way of being the least bit satirical in her view of things, you felt too that she was altogether good-natured, and even that, at need, she could show herself spontaneously kind, generous, devoted.  And if you inferred that her temperament inclined rather towards the sensuous than the ascetic, believe me, it did not lessen her attractiveness.

At the time of which I am writing now, the sentiment that reigned between Nina and Old Childe’s retinue of young men was chiefly an esprit-de-corps.  Later on we all fell in love with her; but for the present we were simply amiably fraternal.  We were united to her by a common enthusiasm; we were fellow-celebrants at her ancestral altar—­or, rather, she was the high priestess there, we were her acolytes.  For, with her, filial piety did in very truth partake of the nature of religion; she really, literally, idolised her father.  One only needed to watch her for three minutes, as she sat beside him, to understand the depth and ardour of her emotion:  how she adored him, how she admired him and believed in him, how proud of him she was, how she rejoiced in him.  ‘Oh, you think you know my father,’ I remember her saying to us once.  ’Nobody knows him.  Nobody is great enough to know him.  If people knew him they would fall down and kiss the