sometimes lay quiescent, for largeness of view, such as the Bedouin has upon the desert that he loves and he belongs to; largeness of emotion, largeness of action.  Largeness was manliness—­largeness of thinking and largeness of living.  Not the drawing-room of the world, but the desert of the world, with its exquisite oases, was the right place for a man.  Yet here he was in a drawing-room.  At this moment he longed to go out from it.  But he longed also to catch this woman by the hand and draw her out with him.  And he remembered how Browning, the poet, had loved a woman who lay always in a shrouded room, too ill to look on the sunshine or breathe the wide airs of the world; and how he carried her away and took her to the peaks of the Apennines.  The mere thought of such a change in a life was like a cry of joy.

“What is it?” said Mrs. Chepstow, surprised at the sudden radiance in Nigel’s face, seeing before her for the first time a man she could not read, but a man whose physique now forcibly appealed to her—­seemed to become splendid under some inward influence, as a half-naked athlete’s does when he slowly fills his lungs, clenches his fists, and hardens all his muscles.  “What is it?”

But he did not tell her.  He could not tell her.  And he got up to go away.  As he passed the piano, he looked again at the score of “The Dream of Gerontius.”

“Are you fond of that?” he asked her.

“What?  Oh—­’Gerontius’”

She let her eyes rest for a brief instant on his face.

“I love it.  It carries me away—­as the soul is carried away by the angel.  ’This child of clay to me was given’—­do you remember?”

“Yes.”

He bade her good-bye.  The last thing he looked at in her room was “The Scarlet Letter,” bound in white, lying upon her table.  And he glanced from it to her before he went out and shut the door.

Just outside in the corridor he met a neatly dressed French girl, whose eyes were very red.  She had evidently been crying long and bitterly.  She carried over her arm the skirt of a gown, and she went into the room which communicated with Mrs. Chepstow’s sitting-room.

“Poor girl!” thought Nigel.  “I wonder what’s the matter with her.”

He went on down the corridor to the lift, descended, and made his way to the Thames Embankment.

When the door shut behind him, Mrs. Chepstow remained standing for a minute near the piano, waiting, like one expectant of a departing guest’s return.  But Nigel did not come back to say any forgotten, final word.  Presently she realized that she was safely alone, and she went to the piano, sat down, and struck the chords which supported the notes on which the priest dismissed the soul.  But she only played them for a moment.  Then, taking the music off the stand and throwing it on the floor, she began to play a Spanish dance, lascivious, alluring, as full of the body as the music of Elgar is full of the soul.  And she played it very well, as well, almost, as a hot-blooded girl of Seville could have danced it.  As she drew near the end, she heard a sound in the adjoining room, and she stopped abruptly and called out: