‘I have had no information.’

’Impossible!  Barmby has good sense; Bottesini can’t intend to come scraping on that string.  But we won’t lose him; he’s one of us.  Barmby counts for more at a Charity Concert than all the catalogue, and particularly in the country.  But he’s an excellent fellow—­eh?’

‘That he is,’ Nataly agreed.

Victor despatched a cheerful curt consent to see Mr. Barmby privately on the late afternoon of the day to follow.

Nesta, returning home from the park at that hour of the interview, ignorant of Mr. Barmby’s purpose though she was, had her fires extinguished by the rolling roar of curfew along the hall-passage, out of the library.

CHAPTER XVIII

SUITORS FOR THE HAND OF NESTA VICTORIA

When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer Orpheus took that downward way, coming in sight of old Cerberus centiceps, he astutely feigned inattention to the hostile appearances of the multiple beast, and with a wave of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the stroke raised voice.  This much you know.  It may be communicated to you, that there was then beheld the most singular spectacle ever exhibited on the dizzy line of division between the living and the dead.  For those unaccustomed musical tones in the last thin whiff of our sustaining air were so smartingly persuasive as to pierce to the vitals of the faithful Old Dog before his offended sentiments had leisure to rouse their heads against a beggar of a mortal.  The terrible sugariness which poured into him worked like venom to cause an encounter and a wrestling:  his battery of jaws expressed it.  They gaped.  At the same time, his eyeballs gave up.  All the Dog, that would have barked the breathing intruder an hundredfold back to earth, was one compulsory centurion yawn.  Tears, issue of the frightful internal wedding of the dulcet and the sour (a ravishing rather of the latter by the former), rolled off his muzzles.

Now, if you are not for insisting that a magnificent simile shall be composed of exactly the like notes in another octave, you will catch the fine flavour of analogy and be wafted in a beat of wings across the scene of the application of the Rev. Septimus Barmby to Mr. Victor Radnor, that he might enter the house in the guise of suitor for the hand of Nesta Victoria.  It is the excelling merit of similes and metaphors to spring us to vault over gaps and thickets and dreary places.  But, as with the visits of Immortals, we must be ready to receive them.  Beware, moreover, of examining them too scrupulously:  they have a trick of wearing to vapour if closely scanned.  Let it be gratefully for their aid.

So far the comparison is absolute, that Mr. Barmby passed:  he was at liberty to pursue his quest.