sly empty headed, almost light headed. He stared at the fire,
listened to its faint crackling, and felt as if his life were a hollow
shell.

Probably he had stood thus for a considerable time--he did not know
whether for five minutes or an hour--when he was made self-conscious by
an event in the house. He heard two women's voices in conversation,
apparently on the staircase.

One of them said:

"The duster, I tell you!"

The other replied:

"Well, I didn't leave it. Ask Fanny, can't you!"

"Fanny doesn't know."

"She ought to know, then!"

"Ought yourself! Fanny's no business with the duster no more than--"

At this point a third voice intervened in the dialogue. It was
Charmian's, reduced to a sort of intense whisper. It said:

"Alice! Alice! I specially told you not to make a sound in the house.
Your master is at work. The least noise disturbs him. Pray be quiet. If
you must speak, go downstairs."

There was silence, then the sound of rustling, of a door shutting, then
again silence.

Claude came away from the fire.

"Your master is at work."

He dashed down his hands on the big writing-table, with a gesture almost
of despair. Self-consciousness now was like an iron band about him, the
devilish thing that constricts a talent. The hideous knowledge that he
was surrounded by women, intent on him and what he was supposed to be
doing, benumbed his intellect. He imagined the cook in the kitchen
discussing his talent with a rolling-pin in her hand, Charmian's maid
musing over his oddities, with a mouth full of pins, and patterns on her
lap. And he ground his teeth.

"I can't--I can't--I never shall be able to!"

He leaned his elbows on the writing-table and put his head in his hands.
When he looked up, after some minutes, he met Charmian's half-closed,
photographed eyes.

Between twelve and one o'clock the noise of a piano organ playing
vigorously, almost angrily, "You are Queen of my heart to-night," came
up to him from the square, softened, yet scarcely ameliorated, by
distance and intervening walls. With bold impertinence it began,
continued for perhaps three minutes, then abruptly ceased in the middle
of a phrase.

Claude knew why. One of the four maids, incited thereto by Charmian, had
rushed out to control the swarthy Italian who was earning his living in
the land without light.

The master was working.

But the master was not working.

Day followed day, and Claude kept his secret, the se