well as in his work. Was it
not the very curiousness of his relationship with Ingram had made it
so palatable? Was it not the strangeness of his friendship with Lady
Thiselton and the originality of her personality that appealed to him
so much, and was it not his imaginative side that had always been so
pleased with both? Was it not his peculiar temperament that had always
made him keep his relation with each person a thing apart, so that
each was unaware of the others; that had made him like to feel that
his life, in a manner, was cut up into strips, along each of which he
could look back with a certain sense of completeness, though it was
only by the nice fusion of all these isolated completenesses that his
existence could be seen as a whole?

But underneath the imaginative spirit of the poet lay the human spirit
of the man. And if the former predominated the latter was not entirely
dormant. If the poet in him coloured his life and thought, it was the
man in him that felt the results, so that the instincts of the poet
often clashed with the sympathies and affections of the man. Of this
discord within himself he could not help being aware, but he knew it
purely by its effect, for he had never searched deeply into the
complexity of his nature.

Thus it was that the man in him was grieved at his having had to make
promises of further visits to the Medhursts; was paying for every
grain of happiness wrung from the evening by a reaction of pain
unspeakable. But the poet in him governed, was trying to suppress the
man.

He was roused from his meditations by a familiar voice when he was but
a few feet from his own door.

"I have been hovering about for a quarter of an hour."

He was startled, then laughed. The veiled woman stood on tip-toe and
kissed him on the forehead, he stooping mechanically to meet her
movement.

"You don't mind the veil?" she said.

"How did you know I was not indoors and abed by this time?" he asked.

"I didn't know. I only came to meditate in the moonlight. I have been
enjoying such exquisite emotions. Are you too tired for a promenade
round the circle?"

He fell in with her humour.

"Morgan, reproaches have been accumulating. To save time--you know I
never waste any--you shall have them all in one ferocious phrase. You
have been brutal to me of late. I don't mean to say that you've ever
ceased to be charming, but--why, at least, didn't you answer my note?"

"It only came this morning,