by himself. As he thought of his Greek
texts and his untenanted Oxford rooms, he had the same sort of craving
that an opium-eater has cut off from his drugs. How was he to get
through?

Presently he walked back into the study, secured an armful of volumes,
and carried them out. True to himself in the smallest things, he could
never in his life be content with the companionship of one book. To
cut off the possibility of choice and change in anything whatever was
repugnant to him.

He sat himself down in the shade of a great chestnut near the house, and
an hour glided pleasantly away. As it happened, however, he did not open
one of the books he had brought with him. A thought had struck him as
he sat down, and he went groping in his pockets in search of a
yellow-covered brochure, which, when found, proved to be a new play by
Dumas, just about to be produced by a French company in London. Langham,
whose passion for the French theatre supplied him, as we know, with a
great deal of life, without the trouble of living, was going to see it,
and always made a point of reading the piece beforehand.

The play turned upon a typical French situation, treated in a manner
rather more French than usual. The reader shrugged his shoulders a good
deal as he read on. 'Strange nation!' he muttered to himself after an
act or two. 'How they do revel in mud!'

Presently, just as the fifth act was beginning to get hold of him with
that force which, after all, only a French playwright is master of, he
looked up and saw the two sisters coming round the corner of the house
from the great kitchen garden which stretched its grass paths and
tangled flower-masses down the further slope of the hill. The transition
was sharp from Dumas' heated atmosphere of passion and crime to the
quiet English rectory, its rural surroundings, and the figures of the
two Englishwomen advancing toward him.

Catherine was in a loose white dress with a black lace scarf draped
about her head and form. Her look hardly suggested youth, and there was
certainly no touch of age in it. Ripeness, maturity, serenity--these
were the chief ideas which seemed to rise in the mind at sight of her.

'Are you amusing yourself, Mr. Langham?' she said, stopping beside
him and retaining with slight, imperceptible force Rose's hand, which
threatened to slip away.

'Very much. I have been skimming through a play, which I hope to see
next week, by way of preparation.'

Rose turned i