would only have smiled, unhit, being too sensible and good-humoured
easily to take offence.

It was always a mystery to his friends where Dove got his information;
he was never seen to read, and there was little theorising about art,
little but the practical knowledge of it, in the circles to which he
belonged. But just as he went about picking up small items of gossip,
so he also gathered in stray scraps of thought and information, and
being by nature endowed with an excellent memory, he let nothing that
he had once heard escape him. He had, besides, the talker's gift of
neatly stringing together these tags he had pulled off other people, of
connecting them, and giving them a varnish of originality.

"By no means a fool," Madeleine was in the habit of saying of him. "He
would be easier to deal with if he were."

Here, on the leading motive as handled by Wagner and Wagner's
forerunners, he had an unwritten treatise ripe in his brain. But he had
only just compared the individual motives to the lettered ribbons that
issue from the mouths of the figures in medieval pictures, and began to
hint at the IDEE FIXE of Berlioz, when he was interrupted by a knock at
the door.

"HEREIN!" cried Madeleine in her clear voice; and at the sight of the
person who opened the door, Maurice involuntarily started up from his
chair, and taking his stand behind it, held the back of it firmly with
both hands, in self-defence.

It was Louise.

On seeing the two young men, she hesitated, and, with the door-handle
still in her hand, smiled a faint questioning smile at Madeleine,
raising her eyebrows and showing a thin line of white between her lips.

"May I come in?" she asked, with her head a little on one side.

"Why, of course you know you may," said Madeleine with some asperity.

And so Louise entered, and came forward to the table at which they had
been sitting; but before anything further could be said, she raised her
arms to catch up a piece of hair which had fallen loose on her neck.
The young men were standing, waiting to greet her, Maurice still behind
his chair; but she did not hurry on their account, or "just on their
account did not hurry," as Madeleine mentally remarked.

Both watched Louise, and followed her movements. To their eyes, she
appeared to be very simply dressed; it was only Madeleine who
appreciated the cost and care of this seeming simplicity. She wore a
plain, close-fitting black dress, of a smooth, shiny s