He rose
and went to meet her, and in his eyes there was a light, a light of
wonder and of worship.
"I think," she said, "you do look a little happier."
"I am tolerably happy, thanks."
"So am I."
"Yes, but _you_ don't look it. What are you thinking of?"
She turned, and they walked together towards the house.
"I was thinking--it's quite cool, now, Horace--of what you said--about
that friend of yours."
"Lucy! Was I rude? Did I make you unhappy?"
"Not you. Don't you see that it's just because I'm happy that I want
to be kind to him?"
"Just like your sweetness. But, dear child, you can't be kind to
everybody. It really doesn't do."
She said no more; she had certainly something else to think about.
That was on a Tuesday, a hot afternoon in July, eighteen ninety-one.
CHAPTER II
It was Wednesday evening in April, eighteen ninety-two. Spring was
coming up on the south wind from the river; spring was in the narrow
streets and in the great highway of the Strand, and in a certain
bookseller's shop in the Strand. And it was Easter, not to say Bank
Holiday, already in the soul of the young man who sat there compiling
the Quarterly Catalogue. For it was in the days of his obscurity.
The shop, a corner one, was part of a gigantic modern structure, with
a decorated facade in pinkish terra-cotta, and topped by four pinkish
cupolas. It was brutally, tyrannously imposing. It towered above its
neighbours, dwarfing the long sky-line of the Strand; its flushed
cupolas mocked the white and heavenly soaring of St.
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