n Piccadilly.

Well, he was glad to find his old friend and comrade, Nina, getting on
so well and so proud of her success and looking so charming in her new
part; and he guessed that she must have written to the grumbling old
Pandiani, and sent photographs of herself as Grace Mainwaring to Andrea
and Carmela and her other Neapolitan friends. But it was not of Nina
that he thought long, as he lay in the easy-chair and smoked, and
listened to the heavy murmur of the streets without. He had not got used
to London yet. The theatre seemed to him a great, glaring thing; the
lime-light an impertinent sham; even the applause of the delighted
audience somehow brutal and offensive. There was no repose, no
reticence, no self-respect and modesty about the whole affair; it was
all too violent; a fanfaronade; a coarse and ostentatious make-believe,
that seemed a kind of insult to a quiet mind. He turned away from it
altogether. His fancies had fled to the North again; the long railway
journey was annihilated; again he was driving out to the still and
beautiful valley, where those kind friends were standing at the door of
the lodge, fluttering a white welcome to him. He goes down the steep
hillside; he crosses the stream at the Horse's Drink; he reaches the
hall-door and is shaking hands with this one and that. And if the tall,
proud maiden with the fine forehead and the clear, calm hazel eyes is
not among this group, be sure she will be here in the evening to add her
greeting to the rest. Oh, to think of that next morning--the sweet air
blowing down from the hills--the silver lights among the purple
clouds--the Aivron swinging along its gravelly bed, a deep, clear bronze
where the sunlight strikes the shallows! Farther and farther into the
solitudes these two idly wander--away from human ken--until the dogs in
the kennels are no longer heard, nor is there even a black-cock crowing
in the woods; nothing but the hum of the bees, and the whisper of the
birch branches, and the hushed, low thunder of the Geinig falls. He
could almost hear it now; or was not the continuous murmur that dazed
and dinned his ears a sadly different sound--the muffled roar of cabs
and carriages along Piccadilly, bearing home this teeming population
from the blare and glare of the crowded theatres? A different sound
indeed! He had come into another world; and the Aivron and Geinig, far
away, were alone with the darkness and the stars.

CHAPTER XIV.

A M