nd Elsmere talked of would hardly
take much waiting for.

So cogitating, Langham took his way westward to his Beaumont Street
rooms. They were on the second floor, small, dingy, choked with books.
Ordinarily he shut the door behind him with a sigh of content. This
evening they seemed to him intolerably confined and stuffy. He thought
of going out to his club and a concert, but did nothing, after all, but
sit brooding over the fire till midnight, alternately hugging and hating
his solitude.

And so we return to the Wednesday following this unexpected meeting.

The drawing-room at No. 27 was beginning to fill. Rose stood at the door
receiving the guests as they flowed in, while Agnes in the background
dispensed tea. She was discussing with herself the probability of
Langham's appearance. 'Whom shall I introduce him to first?' she
pondered, while she shook hands. 'The poet? I see Mamma is now
struggling with him. The 'cellist with the hair--or the lady in Greek
dress--or the esoteric Buddhist? What a fascinating selection! I had
really no notion we should be quite so curious!'

'Mees Rose, they wait for you,' said a charming golden-bearded young
German, viola in hand, bowing before her. He and his kind were most of
them in love with her already, and all the more so because she knew so
well how to keep them at a distance.

She went off, beckoning to Agnes to take her place, and the quartet
began. The young German aforesaid played the viola, while the 'cello was
divinely played by a Hungarian, of whose outer man it need only be said
that in wild profusion of much-tortured hair, in Hebraism of feature,
and swarthy smoothness of cheek, he belonged to that type which Nature
would seem to have already used to excess in the production of the
continental musician. Rose herself was violinist, and the instruments
dashed into the opening allegro with a precision and an _entrain_ that
took the room by storm.

In the middle of it, Langham pushed his way into the crowd round the
drawing-room door. Through the heads about him he could see her standing
a little in advance of the others, her head turned to one side, really
in the natural attitude of violin-playing, but, as it seemed to him, in
a kind of ravishment of listening--cheeks flushed, eyes shining, and the
right arm and high-curved wrist managing the bow with a grace born of
knowledge and fine training.

'Very much improved, eh?' said an English professional to a German