their ears
as thick as sugar-plums in a carnival. And at nine you might have
found the handsome dramatist alone upon the East Terrace of Ouseley,
pacing to and fro in the moonlight, and complacently reflecting upon
his quite indisputable and, past doubt, unmerited good fortune.

There was never any night in June which nature planned the more
adroitly. Soft and warm and windless, lit by a vainglorious moon and
every star that ever shone, the beauty of this world caressed and
heartened its beholder like a gallant music. Our universe, Mr.
Wycherley conceded willingly, was excellent and kindly, and the Arbiter
of it too generous; for here was he, the wastrel, like the third prince
at the end of a fairy-tale, the master of a handsome wife, and a fine
house and fortune. Somewhere, he knew, young Minifie, with his arm in
a sling, was pleading with Mistress Araminta for the last time; and
this reflection did not greatly trouble Mr. Wycherley, since
incommunicably it tickled his vanity. He was chuckling when he came to
the open window.

Within a woman was singing, to the tinkling accompaniment of a spinet,
for the delectation of Lord Remon. She was not uncomely, and the hard,
lean, stingy countenance of the attendant nobleman was almost genial.
Wycherley understood with a great rending shock, as though the thought
were novel, that Olivia, Lady Drogheda, designed to marry this man, who
grinned within finger's reach--or, rather, to ally herself with Remon's
inordinate wealth,--and without any heralding a brutal rage and hatred
of all created things possessed the involuntary eavesdropper.

She looked up into Remon's face and, laughing with such bright and
elfin mirth as never any other woman showed, thought Wycherley, she
broke into another song. She would have spared Mr. Wycherley that had
she but known him to be within earshot. . . . Oh, it was only Lady
Drogheda who sang, he knew,--the seasoned gamester and coquette, the
veteran of London and of Cheltenham,--but the woman had no right to
charm this haggler with a voice that was not hers. For it was the
voice of another Olivia, who was not a fine and urban lady, and who
lived nowhere any longer; it was the voice of a soft-handed, tender,
jeering girl, whom he alone remembered; and a sick, illimitable rage
grilled in each vein of him as liltingly she sang, for Remon, the old
and foolish song which Wycherley had made in her praise very long ago,
and of which he might n