mmed
glasses, from which hung a rather broad black riband. His thin figure
looked stiff even in an arm-chair. His big brown-red hands held the book
up. His legs were crossed, and his feet were strongly defined by the
snowy white spats which partially concealed the varnished black boots.
He looked a distinguished old man as he sat there--but he looked old.

"Is it possible that I look at all that sort of age?" was Lady
Sellingworth's thought as, for a brief instant, she contemplated him,
with an intensity, a sort of almost fierce sharpness which she was
scarcely aware of.

He looked up, made a twitching movement; his pince-nez fell to his black
coat, and he got up alertly.

"Adela!"

She shut the door and went towards him, and as she did so she thought:

"If I had seen Alick Craven sitting there reading!"

"I was having a look at this."

He held up the book. It was Baudelaire's "_Les Fleurs du Mal_."

"Not the book for you!" she said. "Though your French is so good."

"No."

He laid it down, and she noticed the tangle of veins on his hand.

"The dandy in literature doesn't appeal to me. I must say many of these
poets strike me as decadent fellows, not helped to anything like real
manliness by their gifts."

She sat down on the sofa, just where she had sat to have those long
talks with Craven about Waring and Italy, the sea people, the colours of
the sails on those ships which look magical in sunsets, which move on as
if bearing argosies from gorgeous hidden lands of the East.

"But never mind Baudelaire," he continued, and his eyes, heavily lidded
and shrouded by those big bushy eyebrows which seem to sprout almost
with ardent violence as the body grows old, looked at her with melting
kindness. "What have you been doing, my dear? The old dog wants to know.
There is something on your mind, isn't there?"

Lady Sellingworth had once said to Sir Seymour that he reminded her of a
big dog, and he had laughed and said that he was a big dog belonging to
her. Since that day, when he wrote to her, he had often signed himself
"the old dog." And often she had thought of him almost as one thinks of
a devoted dog, absolutely trustworthy, ready for instant attack on your
enemies, faithful with unquestioning faithfulness through anything.

As he spoke he gently took her hand, and she thought, "If Alick Craven
were taking my hand!"

The touch of his skin was warm and very dry. It gave her a woman's
thoughts, not to be