With an upward movement of her hand the speaker, was sufficiently explicit.  Otway, he knew not why, tried to laugh, and frightened himself with the sound.

“She is not the only girl, good and beautiful,” Mrs. Hannaford continued, pleading with him.

“For me she is,” he replied, in a hard voice.  “And I believe she will be always.”

For a minute or two the little warbler sang in silence, then Piers, of a sudden, stood up, and strode hastily away.

Mrs. Hannaford fell into reverie.  Her daughter was in London to-day, her husband absent somewhere else.  But she had not been solitary, for Daniel Otway, failing to meet his brother, lingered a couple of hours in the drawing-room.  As she sat dreaming under the soft light, her face relieved for the moment of its weariness and discontent, had a beauty more touching than that of youth.

Upstairs, Piers found a letter awaiting him.  He did not know the writing, and found with surprise that it came from his brother Alexander, who had addressed it to him through their father’s solicitor.  Alexander wrote from the neighbourhood of Bloomsbury Square; it was an odd letter, beginning formally, almost paternally, and running off into chirruping facetiousness, as if the writer had tried in vain to subdue his natural gaiety.  There were extraordinary phrases.  “I congratulate you on being gazetted major in the regiment of Old Time.”  “For my own part I am just beginning my thirty-fifth round with knuckly life, and I rejoice to say that I have come up smiling.  Floorers I have suffered, not a few, in the rounds preceding, but I am harder for it, harder and gamer.”  “Shall we not crack a bottle together on this side of the circumfluent Oceanus?” And so on, to the effect that Alexander much wished for a meeting with his brother, and urged him to come to Theobald’s Road as soon as possible, at his own convenience.

It gave Piers—­what he needed badly—­something new to think about.  From what he remembered of Alexander, he did not dislike him, and this letter made, on the whole, an agreeable impression; but he remembered Daniel’s warning.  In any case, there could be no harm in calling on his brother; it made an excuse for a day in London, the country stillness having driven him all but to frenzy.  So he replied at once, saying that he would call on the following afternoon.

Alexander occupied the top floor of a great old house in Theobald’s Road.  Whether he was married or not, Piers had not heard; the appearance of the place suggested bachelor quarters, but, as he knocked at what seemed the likely door, there sounded from within an infantine wail, which became alarmingly shrill when the door was thrown open by a dirty little girl.  At sight of Piers this young person, evidently a servant, drew back smiling, and said with a strong Irish accent: 

“Please to come in.  They’re expecting of you.”