ould treat her as one. 'When we were chatting the
other night,' he went on, turning to her again as he stood leaning on
the gate, 'do you know what it was struck me most?'

His tone had in it the most delicate, the most friendly deference. But
Rose flushed furiously.

'That girls are very ready to talk about themselves, I imagine,' she
said scornfully.

'Not at all! Not for a moment! No, but it seemed to me so pathetic, so
strange that anybody should wish for anything so much as you wished for
the musician's life.'

'And you never wish for anything?' she cried.

'When Elsmere was at college,' he said, smiling, 'I believe I wished he
should get a first class. This year I have certainly wished to say
good-bye to St. Anselm's, and to turn my back for good and all on my
men. I can't remember that I have wished for anything else for six
years.'

She looked at him perplexed. Was his manner merely languid, or was it
from him that the emotion she felt invading herself first started? She
tried to shake it off.

'And _I_ am just a bundle of wants,' she said, half-mockingly.
'Generally speaking I am in the condition of being ready to barter all I
have for some folly or other--one in the morning, another in the
afternoon. What have you to say to such people, Mr. Langham?'

Her eyes challenged him magnificently, mostly out of sheer nervousness.
But the face they rested on seemed suddenly to turn to stone before her.
The life died out of it. It grew still and rigid.

'Nothing,' he said quietly. 'Between them and me there is a great gulf
fixed. I watch them pass, and I say to myself: "There are _the
living_--that is how they look, how they speak! Realise once for all
that you have nothing to do with them. Life is theirs--belongs to
_them_. You are already outside it. Go your way, and be a spectre among
the active and the happy no longer."'

He leant his back against the gate. Did he see her? Was he conscious of
her at all in this rare impulse of speech which had suddenly overtaken
one of the most withdrawn and silent of human beings? All her airs
dropped off her; a kind of fright seized her; and involuntarily she laid
her hand on his arm.

'Don't--don't--Mr. Langham! Oh, don't say such things! Why should you be
so unhappy? Why should you talk so? Can no one do anything? Why do you
live so much alone? Is there no one you care about?'

He turned. What a vision! His artistic sense absorbed it in an
instant--the beautiful