fter the installation of the canary Lancelot found himself slipping
more and more into a continuous matter-of-course flirtation; more and
more forgetting the slavey in the candid young creature who had, at
moments, strange dancing lights in her awakened eyes, strange flashes
of witchery in her ingenuous expression. And yet he made a desultory
struggle against what a secret voice was always whispering was a
degradation. He knew she had no real place in his life; he scarce
thought of her save when she came bodily before his eyes with her
pretty face and her trustful glance.

He felt no temptation to write sonatas on her eyebrow--to borrow
Peter's variation, for the use of musicians, of Shakespeare's "write
sonnets on his mistress's eyebrow"--and, indeed, he knew she could be
no fit mistress for him--this starveling drudge, with passive passions,
meek, accepting, with well-nigh every spark of spontaneity choked out
of her. The women of his dreams were quite other--beautiful,
voluptuous, full of the joy of life, tremulous with poetry and lofty
thought, with dark, amorous orbs that flashed responsive to his magic
melodies. They hovered about him as he wrote and played--Venuses
rising from the seas of his music. And then--with his eyes full of the
divine tears of youth, with his brain a hive of winged dreams--he would
turn and kiss merely Mary Ann! Such is the pitiful breed of mortals.

And after every such fall he thought more contemptuously of Mary Ann.
Idealise her as he might, see all that was best in her as he tried to
do, she remained common and commonplace enough. Her ingenuousness,
while from one point of view it was charming, from another was but a
pleasant synonym for silliness. And it might not be ingenuousness--or
silliness--after all! For was Mary Ann as innocent as she looked? The
guilelessness of the dove might very well cover the wisdom of the
serpent. The instinct--the repugnance that made him sponge off her
first kiss from his lips--was probably a true instinct. How was it
possible a girl of that class should escape the sordid attentions of
street swains? Even when she was in the country she was well-nigh of
woo-able age, the likely cynosure of neighbouring ploughboys' eyes.
And what of the other lodgers?

A finer instinct--that of a gentleman--kept him from putting any
questions to Mary Ann. Indeed, his own delicacy repudiated the images
that strove to find entry in his brain, even as his fa