thelberta's
thoughts might have been made from her manner of passing the minutes
away. Instead of reading, entering notes in her diary, or doing any
ordinary thing, she walked to and fro, curled her pretty nether lip
within her pretty upper one a great many times, made a cradle of her
locked fingers, and paused with fixed eyes where the walls of the room
set limits upon her walk to look at nothing but a picture within her
mind.

2. CHRISTOPHER'S HOUSE--SANDBOURNE TOWN--SANDBOURNE MOOR

During the wet autumn of the same year, the postman passed one morning as
usual into a plain street that ran through the less fashionable portion
of Sandbourne, a modern coast town and watering-place not many miles from
the ancient Anglebury. He knocked at the door of a flat-faced brick
house, and it was opened by a slight, thoughtful young man, with his hat
on, just then coming out. The postman put into his hands a book packet,
addressed, 'Christopher Julian, Esq.'

Christopher took the package upstairs, opened it with curiosity, and
discovered within a green volume of poems, by an anonymous writer, the
title-page bearing the inscription, 'Metres by E.' The book was new,
though it was cut, and it appeared to have been looked into. The young
man, after turning it over and wondering where it came from, laid it on
the table and went his way, being in haste to fulfil his engagements for
the day.

In the evening, on returning home from his occupations, he sat himself
down cosily to read the newly-arrived volume. The winds of this
uncertain season were snarling in the chimneys, and drops of rain spat
themselves into the fire, revealing plainly that the young man's room was
not far enough from the top of the house to admit of a twist in the flue,
and revealing darkly a little more, if that social rule-of-three inverse,
the higher in lodgings the lower in pocket, were applicable here.
However, the aspect of the room, though homely, was cheerful, a somewhat
contradictory group of furniture suggesting that the collection consisted
of waifs and strays from a former home, the grimy faces of the old
articles exercising a curious and subduing effect on the bright faces of
the new. An oval mirror of rococo workmanship, and a heavy cabinet-piano
with a cornice like that of an Egyptian temple, adjoined a harmonium of
yesterday, and a harp that was almost as new. Printed music of the last
century, and manuscript music of the previous e