it seems to present difficulties.  Let’s give an air for the tenor:  key—­O, something modern!—­seven sharps.’  And he made a businesslike signature across the staves, and then paused and browsed for a while on the handle of his pen.  Melody, with no better inspiration than a sheet of paper, is not usually found to spring unbidden in the mind of the amateur; nor is the key of seven sharps a place of much repose to the untried.  He cast away that sheet.  ’It will help to build up the character of Jimson,’ Gideon remarked, and again waited on the muse, in various keys and on divers sheets of paper, but all with results so inconsiderable that he stood aghast.  ‘It’s very odd,’ thought he.  ’I seem to have less fancy than I thought, or this is an off-day with me; yet Jimson must leave something.’  And again he bent himself to the task.

Presently the penetrating chill of the houseboat began to attack the very seat of life.  He desisted from his unremunerative trial, and, to the audible annoyance of the rats, walked briskly up and down the cabin.  Still he was cold.  ‘This is all nonsense,’ said he.  ’I don’t care about the risk, but I will not catch a catarrh.  I must get out of this den.’

He stepped on deck, and passing to the bow of his embarkation, looked for the first time up the river.  He started.  Only a few hundred yards above another houseboat lay moored among the willows.  It was very spick-and-span, an elegant canoe hung at the stern, the windows were concealed by snowy curtains, a flag floated from a staff.  The more Gideon looked at it, the more there mingled with his disgust a sense of impotent surprise.  It was very like his uncle’s houseboat; it was exceedingly like—­it was identical.  But for two circumstances, he could have sworn it was the same.  The first, that his uncle had gone to Maidenhead, might be explained away by that flightiness of purpose which is so common a trait among the more than usually manly.  The second, however, was conclusive:  it was not in the least like Mr Bloomfield to display a banner on his floating residence; and if he ever did, it would certainly be dyed in hues of emblematical propriety.  Now the Squirradical, like the vast majority of the more manly, had drawn knowledge at the wells of Cambridge—­he was wooden spoon in the year 1850; and the flag upon the houseboat streamed on the afternoon air with the colours of that seat of Toryism, that cradle of Puseyism, that home of the inexact and the effete Oxford.  Still it was strangely like, thought Gideon.

And as he thus looked and thought, the door opened, and a young lady stepped forth on deck.  The barrister dropped and fled into his cabin—­it was Julia Hazeltine!  Through the window he watched her draw in the canoe, get on board of it, cast off, and come dropping downstream in his direction.

‘Well, all is up now,’ said he, and he fell on a seat.

‘Good-afternoon, miss,’ said a voice on the water.  Gideon knew it for the voice of his landlord.