ourtier passed by dubiously. His feelings
in the presence of those towers were always a little mixed. There was
not so much of the poet in him as to cause him to see nothing there at
all save only same lines against the sky, but there was enough of the
poet to make him long to kick something; and in this mood he wended his
way to the riverside.

Mrs. Noel was not at home, but since the maid informed him that she would
be in directly, he sat down to wait. Her flat, which was on--the first
floor, overlooked the river and had evidently been taken furnished, for
there were visible marks of a recent struggle with an Edwardian taste
which, flushed from triumph over Victorianism, had filled the rooms with
early Georgian remains. On the only definite victory, a rose-coloured
window seat of great comfort and little age, Courtier sat down, and
resigned himself to doing nothing with the ease of an old soldier.

To the protective feeling he had once had for a very graceful,
dark-haired child, he joined not only the championing pity of a man of
warm heart watching a woman in distress, but the impatience of one, who,
though temperamentally incapable of feeling oppressed himself, rebelled
at sight of all forms of tyranny affecting others.

The sight of the grey towers, still just visible, under which Miltoun and
his father sat, annoyed him deeply; symbolizing to him, Authority--foe to
his deathless mistress, the sweet, invincible lost cause of Liberty. But
presently the river; bringing up in flood the unbound water that had
bathed every shore, touched all sands, and seen the rising and falling of
each mortal star, so soothed him with its soundless hymn to Freedom, that
Audrey Noel coming in with her hands full of flowers, found him sleeping
firmly, with his mouth shut.

Noiselessly putting down the flowers, she waited for his awakening. That
sanguine visage, with its prominent chin, flaring moustaches, and
eyebrows raised rather V-shaped above his closed eyes, wore an expression
of cheery defiance even in sleep; and perhaps no face in all London was
so utterly its obverse, as that of this dark, soft-haired woman,
delicate, passive, and tremulous with pleasure at sight of the only
person in the world from whom she felt she might learn of Miltoun,
without losing her self-respect.

He woke at last, and manifesting no discomfiture, said:

"It was like you not to wake me."

They sat for a long while talking, the riverside traff