inst Monty, say it I may find it in his favour."

Impatiently Verelst motioned. "Decent men avoid him."

"And you!" Mrs. Austen retorted. "What do you call yourself? You are
always civil to him."

Verelst showed his teeth. "One of the few things life has taught me is
to be civil to everybody."

"Except to me. Now do sit down and make yourself uncomfortable. You have
made me uncomfortable enough. Any one might think you a country parson."

But Verelst, scowling at the dial which the legs of the nymph upheld,
removed his glasses. "I am going." He moved to the door, stopped, half
turned, motioned again. "Tell Margaret I would rather see her in her
coffin."

Angrily she started. "I'll tell her nothing of the kind."

It was his back that she addressed. She saw him go, saw too her anger go
with him. The outer door had not closed before the tune of which he had
spoken was dispersing it.

But was it a tune? It seemed something far rarer. In it was a whisper of
waters, the lap of waves, the muffled voice of a river, which, winding
from hill to sea, was pierced by a note very high, very clear, entirely
limpid, a note that had in it the gaiety of a sunbeam, a note that
mounted in loops of light, expanding as it mounted, until, bursting into
jets of fire, it drew from the stream's deepest depths the sonority and
glare of its riches.

The ripple of it ran down the spine of this woman, who at heart was a
Hun and to whom the harmonies disclosed, not the mythical gleam of the
Rheingold, but the real radiance of the Paliser wealth.

At the glow of it she rubbed her hands.

XXIII

In the club window, on the following afternoon, Jones was airing copy.

"Capua must have been packed with yawns. It is the malediction of
mortals to want what they lack until they get it, when they want it no
more. Epicurus said that or, if he did not, Lucretius said it for him.
'Surgit amari aliquid.' But here I am running into quotations when the
only ones that interest anybody are those in the Street. Conditions here
are revolting. Nowhere at any time has there been a metropolis that so
stank to heaven. The papers drip with stocks and scandals and over
there, before the massed artillery, the troops are wheeling down to
death. But wheeling is perhaps poetic. The Marne was the last battle in
the grand style."

"I don't see what that has to do with Capua," said Verelst.

"Nor I," Jones replied. "But, come to think of it, there is a
co