He went back to the room and shut the door, but could not shut out her image.  The picture she had unwittingly supplied of herself took possession of his imagination:  he saw her almost as a dream-figure—­the virginal figure he knew—­standing by the stream in the sunset, amid the elms and silver birches, with daisies in her hands and bluebells at her feet, inhaling the delicate scent that wafted from the white hawthorn bushes, and watching the water glide along till it seemed gradually to wash away the fading colours of the sunset that glorified it.  And as he dwelt on the vision he felt harmonies and phrases stirring and singing in his brain, like a choir of awakened birds.  Quickly he seized paper and wrote down the theme that flowed out at the point of his pen—­a reverie full of the haunting magic of quiet waters and woodland sunsets and the gracious innocence of maidenhood.  When it was done he felt he must give it a distinctive name.  He cast about for one, pondering and rejecting titles innumerable.  Countless lines of poetry ran through his head, from which he sought to pick a word or two as one plucks a violet from a posy.  At last a half-tender, half-whimsical look came into his face, and picking his pen out of his hair, he wrote merely—­“Marianne.”

It was only natural that Mary Ann should be unable to maintain herself—­or be maintained—­at this idyllic level.  But her fall was aggravated by two circumstances, neither of which had any particular business to occur.  The first was an intimation from the misogamist German Professor that he had persuaded another of his old pupils to include a prize-symphony by Lancelot in the programme of a Crystal Palace Concert.  This was of itself sufficient to turn Lancelot’s head away from all but thoughts of Fame, even if Mary Ann had not been luckless enough to be again discovered cleaning the steps—­and without gloves.  Against such a spectacle the veriest idealist is powerless.  If Mary Ann did not immediately revert to the category of quadrupeds in which she had started, it was only because of Lancelot’s supplementary knowledge of the creature.  But as he passed her by, solicitous as before not to tread upon her, he felt as if all the cold water in her pail were pouring down the back of his neck.

Nevertheless, the effect of both of these turns of fortune was transient.  The symphony was duly performed, and dismissed in the papers as promising, if over-ambitious; the only tangible result was a suggestion from the popular composer, who was a member of his club, that Lancelot should collaborate with him in a comic opera, for the production of which he had facilities.  The composer confessed he had a fluent gift of tune, but had no liking for the drudgery of orchestration, and, as Lancelot was well up in these tedious technicalities, the two might strike a partnership to mutual advantage.