ptember mist had
passed into it.

Langham stood and watched, hidden, as he thought, by the curtain, till a
gust of wind shook the casement window beside him, and threatened to
blow it in upon him. He put out his hand perforce to save it, and the
slight noise caught Rose's ear. She looked up; her smile vanished. 'Go
down, Dandie,' she said severely, and walked quickly into the house with
as much dignity as nineteen is capable of.

At breakfast the Elsmeres found their guest a difficulty. But they also,
as we know, had expected it. He was languor itself; none of their
conversational efforts succeeded; and Rose, studying him out of the
corners of her eyes, felt that it would be of no use even to torment so
strange and impenetrable a being. Why on earth should people come and
visit their friends if they could not keep up even the ordinary decent
pretences of society?

Robert had to go off to some clerical business afterwards, and Langham
wandered out into the garden by himself. As he thought of his Greek
texts and his untenanted Oxford rooms, he had the same sort of craving
that an opium-eater has cut off from his drugs. How was he to get
through?

Presently he walked back into the study, secured an armful of volumes,
and carried them out. True to himself in the smallest things, he could
never in his life be content with the companionship of one book. To cut
off the possibility of choice and change in anything whatever was
repugnant to him.

He sat himself down under the shade of a great chestnut near the house,
and an hour glided pleasantly away. As it happened, however, he did not
open one of the books he had brought with him. A thought had struck him
as he sat down, and he went groping in his pockets in search of a
yellow-covered _brochure_, which, when found, proved to be a new play by
Dumas, just about to be produced by a French company in London. Langham,
whose passion for the French theatre supplied him, as we know, with a
great deal of life without the trouble of living, was going to see it,
and always made a point of reading the piece beforehand.

The play turned upon a typical French situation, treated in a manner
rather more French than usual. The reader shrugged his shoulders a good
deal as he read on. 'Strange nation!' he muttered to himself after an
act or two. 'How they do revel in mud!'

Presently, just as the fifth act was beginning to get hold of him with
that force which, after all, only a French