ight was announced he had been reading over some old letters
of Elfride's. They were not many; and until to-night had been sealed
up, and stowed away in a corner of his leather trunk, with a few other
mementoes and relics which had accompanied him in his travels. The
familiar sights and sounds of London, the meeting with his friend, had
with him also revived that sense of abiding continuity with regard to
Elfride and love which his absence at the other side of the world had to
some extent suspended, though never ruptured. He at first intended
only to look over these letters on the outside; then he read one; then
another; until the whole was thus re-used as a stimulus to sad memories.
He folded them away again, placed them in his pocket, and instead of
going on with an examination into the state of the artistic world, had
remained musing on the strange circumstance that he had returned to find
Knight not the husband of Elfride after all.

The possibility of any given gratification begets a cumulative sense of
its necessity. Stephen gave the rein to his imagination, and felt more
intensely than he had felt for many months that, without Elfride, his
life would never be any great pleasure to himself, or honour to his
Maker.

They sat by the fire, chatting on external and random subjects, neither
caring to be the first to approach the matter each most longed
to discuss. On the table with the periodicals lay two or three
pocket-books, one of them being open. Knight seeing from the exposed
page that the contents were sketches only, began turning the leaves over
carelessly with his finger. When, some time later, Stephen was out
of the room, Knight proceeded to pass the interval by looking at the
sketches more carefully.

The first crude ideas, pertaining to dwellings of all kinds, were
roughly outlined on the different pages. Antiquities had been copied;
fragments of Indian columns, colossal statues, and outlandish ornament
from the temples of Elephanta and Kenneri, were carelessly intruded
upon by outlines of modern doors, windows, roofs, cooking-stoves, and
household furniture; everything, in short, which comes within the range
of a practising architect's experience, who travels with his eyes
open. Among these occasionally appeared rough delineations of mediaeval
subjects for carving or illumination--heads of Virgins, Saints, and
Prophets.

Stephen was not professedly a free-hand draughtsman, but he drew the
human figure