he roof-tops of old London,
touching its jumbled architecture with fantastic beauty.

Vagrant towers and angular church spires, uninspired statuary, and
weary, smoke-darkened trees shed their garments of commonplaceness and
shimmered like the mosques and turrets of an enchanted city.

It was one of those nights that are sent to remind us that Beauty still
lives; a night to challenge our mad whirl of bargaining and barter, to
urge us to raise our eyes from the grubbing crawling of avarice; a
night to awaken old memories, and to stir the pent-up streams of poetry
lying asleep in every breast.

It was a moonlight that descended on Old England's troubled heart as a
benediction. Her rivers were glimmering paths winding about the
country-side; her villages and her heavy-scented country lanes shared
its caress with open meadows and murky cities. The sea, binding the
little islands in its turbulent immensity, drew the night's beauty to
its bosom, and the spray of foam rising from the surf was a shower of
star-dust leaping towards the moon.

As a weary traveller drinks thirstily at a pool, Selwyn wandered about
the streets trembling with emotion in the breathless ecstasy of the
night. All day the conjured picture of the German boy, guilty of no
crime save blind devotion to his Fatherland, had haunted him like the
eyes of a murdered man. It had robbed him of the power of constructive
thought, and stopped his writing with the decisiveness of a sword
descending on his wrist; it had made the food on his table tasteless,
and given him a dread of the solitude of his rooms.

With nerves that contracted at every untoward sound, he had gone out at
dark, and gradually the peacefulness of the night had soothed and
calmed him as the dew of dusk cools the earth after the heat of a
summer's day. The familiar strains of Beethoven's 'Moonlight Sonata'
came to his mind, and as he walked he idly traced the different
movements of the music in the moods of the evening's witchery.

His steps, like his thoughts, pursued a tangled course, and led him
into the prosaic brick-and-mortar monotony of Bayswater, but the moon
was lavish in her generosity, and strewed his path with glinting
strands of light. He paused in a quiet square to get his bearings.
There was the heavy smell of fallen leaves from the gardens on the
other side of the railing.

His mind was still playing the slow minor theme of the sonata's opening
movement.

Suddenly the