f luxury. Lehmann in the premier of _Tristan und Isolde_,
with the vast restrained enthusiasm and tensity when, at the end of the
third act, Niemann bared his wounded breast. Eames' rise; but that, and
what followed, were in successive books. He closed the one under his
hand.

As the years drew nearer the present their features became larger, more
indistinct, their music grew louder, dissonant. He had retired further
and further from an opera, a life, with which he was increasingly out of
harmony. Or rather, he added, life moved away from the aging. It was as
if the surrounding affair became objective; as if, once a participant in
a cast--a production, however, less than grand--he had been conducted to
a seat somewhere in the midst of a great, shadowy audience, from which
he looked out of the gloom at the brilliant, removed spectacle. The
final fact that had taken him from the setting of so many of his years
had been the increasing expense of a discriminating existence in New
York. Again his distaste for anything short of absolute nicety had
dictated the form and conditions of his living. When the situation of
his rooms had definitely declined, and the cost of possible
locations--he could not endure a club--became prohibitive; when his once
adequate, unaugmented income assumed the limitations of a mere
sufficiency; and when, too, the old, familiar figures, the swells of his
own period and acquaintance had vanished one by one with their vanishing
halls of assembly--he had retreated to the traditional place of his
family. He had gone back to the home of the Pennys in America.

Not, however, to Myrtle Forge itself, the true centre of his
inheritance. The house there had been uninhabited since his father's
early years; it was a closed and melancholy memento; he had reanimated a
comfortable stone dwelling at Shadrach Furnace; its solid grey facade
drawn out by two happy additions to the original, small square. It had
been, traditionally, at first, the house of the head furnacemen;
sometime after that, perhaps a hundred years, Graham Jannan, newly
married, had lived there while occupied with the active manufacture of
iron; and three summers back he, Howat Penny, the last Penny now, had
returned to the vicinity of Jaffa.

XXIV

The room in which he sat had two windows, set in the deep recesses of
heavy stone walls, and three doors, two leading into opposite rooms and
the third opening without. The double lamp stood