to the
book upon the table. "Byron--ah, Byron. I've known people who knew Lord
Byron," she said.

Katharine, who had risen in some confusion, could not help smiling at
the thought that her mother found it perfectly natural and desirable
that her daughter should be reading Byron in the dining-room late at
night alone with a strange young man. She blessed a disposition that
was so convenient, and felt tenderly towards her mother and her mother's
eccentricities. But Ralph observed that although Mrs. Hilbery held the
book so close to her eyes she was not reading a word.

"My dear mother, why aren't you in bed?" Katharine exclaimed, changing
astonishingly in the space of a minute to her usual condition of
authoritative good sense. "Why are you wandering about?"

"I'm sure I should like your poetry better than I like Lord Byron's,"
said Mrs. Hilbery, addressing Ralph Denham.

"Mr. Denham doesn't write poetry; he has written articles for father,
for the Review," Katharine said, as if prompting her memory.

"Oh dear! How dull!" Mrs. Hilbery exclaimed, with a sudden laugh that
rather puzzled her daughter.

Ralph found that she had turned upon him a gaze that was at once very
vague and very penetrating.

"But I'm sure you read poetry at night. I always judge by the expression
of the eyes," Mrs. Hilbery continued. ("The windows of the soul," she
added parenthetically.) "I don't know much about the law," she went
on, "though many of my relations were lawyers. Some of them looked
very handsome, too, in their wigs. But I think I do know a little
about poetry," she added. "And all the things that aren't written
down, but--but--" She waved her hand, as if to indicate the wealth of
unwritten poetry all about them. "The night and the stars, the dawn
coming up, the barges swimming past, the sun setting.... Ah dear," she
sighed, "well, the sunset is very lovely too. I sometimes think that
poetry isn't so much what we write as what we feel, Mr. Denham."

During this speech of her mother's Katharine had turned away, and
Ralph felt that Mrs. Hilbery was talking to him apart, with a desire
to ascertain something about him which she veiled purposely by the
vagueness of her words. He felt curiously encouraged and heartened by
the beam in her eye rather than by her actual words. From the distance
of her age and sex she seemed to be waving to him, hailing him as a ship
sinking beneath the horizon might wave its flag of greeting to another