n plans for the
future. She swept up her flowers, breathed in their sweetness, and,
humming a little song about a miller's daughter, left the room.

The case upon which Ralph Denham was engaged that afternoon was not
apparently receiving his full attention, and yet the affairs of the late
John Leake of Dublin were sufficiently confused to need all the care
that a solicitor could bestow upon them, if the widow Leake and the five
Leake children of tender age were to receive any pittance at all. But
the appeal to Ralph's humanity had little chance of being heard to-day;
he was no longer a model of concentration. The partition so carefully
erected between the different sections of his life had been broken down,
with the result that though his eyes were fixed upon the last Will and
Testament, he saw through the page a certain drawing-room in Cheyne
Walk.

He tried every device that had proved effective in the past for keeping
up the partitions of the mind, until he could decently go home; but a
little to his alarm he found himself assailed so persistently, as if
from outside, by Katharine, that he launched forth desperately into an
imaginary interview with her. She obliterated a bookcase full of law
reports, and the corners and lines of the room underwent a curious
softening of outline like that which sometimes makes a room unfamiliar
at the moment of waking from sleep. By degrees, a pulse or stress began
to beat at regular intervals in his mind, heaping his thoughts into
waves to which words fitted themselves, and without much consciousness
of what he was doing, he began to write on a sheet of draft paper what
had the appearance of a poem lacking several words in each line. Not
many lines had been set down, however, before he threw away his pen as
violently as if that were responsible for his misdeeds, and tore the
paper into many separate pieces. This was a sign that Katharine
had asserted herself and put to him a remark that could not be met
poetically. Her remark was entirely destructive of poetry, since it was
to the effect that poetry had nothing whatever to do with her; all
her friends spent their lives in making up phrases, she said; all his
feeling was an illusion, and next moment, as if to taunt him with his
impotence, she had sunk into one of those dreamy states which took no
account whatever of his existence. Ralph was roused by his passionate
attempts to attract her attention to the fact that he was standing
i