Selingman became curiously silent.  Soon he paid the bill.

“Will you put me in a cab?” she asked him outside.  He shook his head.

“I shall ride home with you.”

“It is rather a long way,” she reminded him.  “I am down at my old rooms again.  The house in Russell Square is full of workmen, after the fire.”  “It does not matter how far,” he said simply.

His fit of silence continued.  When at last they arrived at their destination, she held out her hand.  Again he shook his head.

“I am coming in,” he announced.

She hesitated.

“My rooms are very tiny.”

“I am coming in,” he repeated.

He followed her up the stairs.  Her little sitting-room was in darkness.  She struck a match and lit the lamp.  She would have pulled down the blind, but he checked her.

“No,” he objected, “let us stand and look down together upon this wilderness.  So!”

They were high up and they looked upon a treeless waste—­rows of houses, tall factories, the line of the river beyond, the murky glow westwards.

“Here I can talk to you,” he said.  “Here it is silent.  Soon I go back to my life and my life’s work.  You, Julia, must go with me.”

She drew a little away from him, speechless with a queer sort of surprise, and a little indignant.  He held her wrist firmly.

“I am a man who has written much of love,” he continued, “of love and life and all the tangled skein of emotions which make of it a complex thing.  And yet so few of us know what love is, so few of us know what companionship is, so few of us know the world in which those others dwell.  You have looked at me with your great eyes, Julia, and at first you saw nothing but a fat, plain old man, with plenty of conceit and a humour for idle speeches.  And today you think a little differently, and as the days go on you will think more differently still, for I am going to take you with me, Julia, and I am going to keep you with me, and I am going to keep the light in your eyes and the laughter at your lips, in the only way that counts.  You will sit with me in my study, you shall see my work come and hear it grow.  I shall take you into the world where the music is born, and your eyes will be closed there, and you will only know that there is another soul there who is your guide, and in whom you trust, and for whom you have a strange feeling.  That is how love comes, Julia—­the only sort of love which lasts.  It isn’t born in this land, it doesn’t even flourish in this universe.  If you don’t come up in the clouds to find it, it isn’t the sort that lasts.  You are going to find it with me, dear.”

She had begun to tremble a little, the tears were in her eyes.

“Oh, I know!” he faltered, with a break in his own voice.  “But you’ll leave your sorrows behind in my world.”

It was midnight when Maraton left the House.  He came out with Mr. Foley, and they stood for a moment at the entrance.  An electric coupe rolled swiftly up.