redness on either cheek, fixed and feverish. Ceased to remark how the
angle of the jaw stood away from and beyond the sinewy, meagre neck, or
note the rise and fall of Adam's apple so prominent in his throat.--No
longer were annoyed by the effeminate character of the hands, their
retracted nails and pink, upturned finger-tips, offering so queer a
contrast to the rather inordinate size of his feet.

For the voice rarely failed to influence its hearers, to carry you indeed
a little out of yourself by its variety of intonation, its fire and
fervour, its languishing modulations, broken pauses, yearning melancholy
of effect. The part of the neurotic hero of the--then--Laureate's poem,
that somewhat pinch-beck Victorian Hamlet, suited our young friend,
moreover, down to the ground. It offered sympathetic expression to his
own nature and temperament; so that he wooed, scoffed, blasphemed,
orated, drowned in salt seas of envy and self-pity, with a simulation of
sincerity as convincing to others as consolatory to himself.

And Damaris, being unlearned in the curious arts of the theatre, listened
wide-eyed, spellbound, until flicked by the swishing skirts of fictitious
emotion into genuine, yet covert, excitement. As the reading progressed
Henrietta Frayling's presence increasingly sank into unimportance. More
and more did the poem assume a personal character, of which, if the
reader were hero, she--Damaris--became heroine. Marshall Wace seemed to
read not to, but definitely at her; so that during more than one ardent
passage, she felt herself go hot all over, as though alone with him, an
acknowledged object of his adoring, despairing declarations. This she
shrank from, yet--it must be owned--found stirring, strangely and not
altogether unpleasantly agitating. For was not this _protege_ of
Henrietta's--whom the latter implored her to encourage and treat
kindly--something of a genius? Capable of sudden and amazing
transformation, talking to you with a modesty and deference agreeably
greater than that of most young men of his age; then, on an instant,
changing at will, and extraordinarily voicing the accumulated wrongs,
joys and sorrows of universal humanity? Could Henrietta, who usually
spoke of him in tones of commiseration, not to say of patronage, be aware
how remarkable he really was? Damaris wondered; regarding him, meanwhile,
with innocent respect and admiration. For how tremendously much he must
have experienced, how greatl