k, and greeted her affectionately.
Edward Hallin sprang up from a table at the further end of the room.

"You are so late! Alice and I had made up our minds you had forgotten
us!"

"I didn't get home till four, and then I had to have a sleep," she
explained, half shyly.

"What! you haven't been night-nursing?"

"Yes, for once."

"Alice, tell them to bring up supper, and let's look after her."

He wheeled round a comfortable chair to the open window--the charming
circular bow of last-century design, which filled up the end of the room
and gave it character. The window looked out on a quiet line of back
gardens, such as may still be seen in Bloomsbury, with fine plane trees
here and there just coming into full leaf; and beyond them the backs of
another line of houses in a distant square, with pleasant irregularities
of old brickwork and tiled roof. The mottled trunks of the planes, their
blackened twigs and branches, their thin, beautiful leaves, the forms of
the houses beyond, rose in a charming medley of line against the blue
and peaceful sky. No near sound was to be heard, only the distant murmur
that no Londoner escapes; and some of the British Museum pigeons were
sunning themselves on the garden-wall below.

Within, the Hallins' room was spacious and barely furnished. The walls,
indeed, were crowded with books, and broken, where the books ceased, by
photographs of Italy and Greece; but of furniture proper there seemed to
be little beside Hallin's large writing-table facing the window, and a
few chairs, placed on the blue drugget which brother and sister had
chosen with a certain anxiety, dreading secretly lest it should be a
piece of self-indulgence to buy what pleased them both so much. On one
side of the fireplace was Miss Hallin's particular corner; her chair,
the table that held her few special books, her work-basket, with its
knitting, her accounts. There, in the intervals of many activities, she
sat and worked or read, always cheerful and busy, and always watching
over her brother.

"I wish," said Hallin, with some discontent, when Marcella had settled
herself, "that we were going to be alone to-night; that would have
rested you more."

"Why, who is coming?" said Marcella, a little flatly. She had certainly
hoped to find them alone.

"Your old friend, Frank Leven, is coming to supper. When he heard you
were to be here he vowed that nothing could or should keep him away.
Then, after supper, one or t