hat no man could help expressing his sense of her good taste.

"Then you won't kiss anybody but me," he said, as he let her go for the
last time. He had a Quixotic sub-consciousness that he was saving her
from his kind by making her promise formally.

"How could I, Mr. Lancelot?" And the brimming eyes shone with soft
light. "I never shall--never."

It sounded like a troth.

He went back to the room and shut the door, but could not shut out her
image. The picture she had unwittingly supplied of herself took
possession of his imagination: he saw her almost as a dream-figure--the
virginal figure he knew--standing by the stream in the sunset, amid the
elms and silver birches, with daisies in her hands and bluebells at her
feet, inhaling the delicate scent that wafted from the white hawthorn
bushes, and watching the water glide along till it seemed gradually to
wash away the fading colours of the sunset that glorified it. And as
he dwelt on the vision he felt harmonies and phrases stirring and
singing in his brain, like a choir of awakened birds. Quickly he
seized paper and wrote down the theme that flowed out at the point of
his pen--a reverie full of the haunting magic of quiet waters and
woodland sunsets and the gracious innocence of maidenhood. When it was
done he felt he must give it a distinctive name. He cast about for
one, pondering and rejecting titles innumerable. Countless lines of
poetry ran through his head, from which he sought to pick a word or two
as one plucks a violet from a posy. At last a half-tender,
half-whimsical look came into his face, and picking his pen out of his
hair, he wrote merely--"Marianne."

It was only natural that Mary Ann should be unable to maintain
herself--or be maintained--at this idyllic level. But her fall was
aggravated by two circumstances, neither of which had any particular
business to occur. The first was an intimation from the misogamist
German Professor that he had persuaded another of his old pupils to
include a prize symphony by Lancelot in the programme of a Crystal
Palace Concert. This was of itself sufficient to turn Lancelot's head
away from all but thoughts of Fame, even if Mary Ann had not been
luckless enough to be again discovered cleaning the steps--and without
gloves. Against such a spectacle the veriest idealist is powerless.
If Mary Ann did not immediately revert to the category of quadrupeds in
which she had started, it was only because of L