is silence--and in the world that was for
him silent. I had, however, the maddening suspicion that he would have
liked to talk. Why wouldn't Watts-Dunton roar him an opportunity? I felt
I had been right perhaps in feeling that the lesser man was--no, not
jealous of the greater whom he had guarded so long and with such love,
but anxious that he himself should be as fully impressive to visitors as
his fine gifts warranted. Not, indeed, that he monopolised the talk.
He seemed to regard me as a source of information about all the
latest 'movements,' and I had to shout banalities while he munched his
mutton--banalities whose one saving grace for me was that they were
inaudible to Swinburne. Had I met Swinburne's gaze, I should have
faltered. Now and again his shining light-grey eyes roved from the
table, darting this way and that--across the room, up at the ceiling,
out of the window; only never at us. Somehow this aloofness gave no hint
of indifference. It seemed to be, rather, a point in good manners--the
good manners of a child 'sitting up to table,' not 'staring,' not
'asking questions,' and reflecting great credit on its invaluable old
nurse. The child sat happy in the wealth of its inner life; the child
was content not to speak until it were spoken to; but, but, I felt it
did want to be spoken to. And, at length, it was.

So soon as the mutton had been replaced by the apple-pie, Watts-Dunton
leaned forward and 'Well, Algernon,' he roared, 'how was it on the Heath
to-day?' Swinburne, who had meekly inclined his ear to the question,
now threw back his head, uttering a sound that was like the cooing of a
dove, and forthwith, rapidly, ever so musically, he spoke to us of his
walk; spoke not in the strain of a man who had been taking his daily
exercise on Putney Heath, but rather in that of a Peri who had at long
last been suffered to pass through Paradise. And rather than that he
spoke would I say that he cooingly and flutingly sang of his experience.
The wonders of this morning's wind and sun and clouds were expressed in
a flow of words so right and sentences so perfectly balanced that they
would have seemed pedantic had they not been clearly as spontaneous as
the wordless notes of a bird in song. The frail, sweet voice rose and
fell, lingered, quickened, in all manner of trills and roulades. That he
himself could not hear it, seemed to me the greatest loss his deafness
inflicted on him. One would have expected this disabi