who had Mr. Pratt in person, in a large bulging white
waistcoat, to remove their dish-covers. Ralph turned up, as he said,
after breakfast, and the little party made out a scheme of entertainment
for the day. As London wears in the month of September a face blank but
for its smears of prior service, the young man, who occasionally took
an apologetic tone, was obliged to remind his companion, to Miss
Stackpole's high derision, that there wasn't a creature in town.

"I suppose you mean the aristocracy are absent," Henrietta answered;
"but I don't think you could have a better proof that if they were
absent altogether they wouldn't be missed. It seems to me the place is
about as full as it can be. There's no one here, of course, but three
or four millions of people. What is it you call them--the lower-middle
class? They're only the population of London, and that's of no
consequence."

Ralph declared that for him the aristocracy left no void that Miss
Stackpole herself didn't fill, and that a more contented man was nowhere
at that moment to be found. In this he spoke the truth, for the stale
September days, in the huge half-empty town, had a charm wrapped in them
as a coloured gem might be wrapped in a dusty cloth. When he went home
at night to the empty house in Winchester Square, after a chain of hours
with his comparatively ardent friends, he wandered into the big dusky
dining-room, where the candle he took from the hall-table, after letting
himself in, constituted the only illumination. The square was still, the
house was still; when he raised one of the windows of the dining-room to
let in the air he heard the slow creak of the boots of a lone constable.
His own step, in the empty place, seemed loud and sonorous; some of the
carpets had been raised, and whenever he moved he roused a melancholy
echo. He sat down in one of the armchairs; the big dark dining table
twinkled here and there in the small candle-light; the pictures on the
wall, all of them very brown, looked vague and incoherent. There was a
ghostly presence as of dinners long since digested, of table-talk
that had lost its actuality. This hint of the supernatural perhaps had
something to do with the fact that his imagination took a flight and
that he remained in his chair a long time beyond the hour at which he
should have been in bed; doing nothing, not even reading the evening
paper. I say he did nothing, and I maintain the phrase in the face of
the fact