Before they parted, Falloden told his companion that the Orpheus would arrive from Paris the following day with a trio of French workmen to set it up. The electric installation was already in place. Everything would be ready by the evening. The instrument was to be placed behind a screen in the built-out room, once a studio, which Falloden had turned into a library. Otto rarely or never went there. The room looked north, and he, whose well-being hung upon sunshine, disliked it. But there was no other place for the Orpheus in the little cottage, and Falloden who had been getting new and thick curtains for the windows, improving the fire-place, and adding some armchairs, was eagerly hopeful that he could turn it into a comfortable music-room for Otto in the winter evenings, while he—if necessary—read his law elsewhere. “Will you come for a rehearsal to-morrow?” he asked her. “Otto comes back the day after.” “No, no! I won’t hear anything, not a note—till he comes! But is he strong enough?” she added wistfully. Strong enough, she meant, to bear agitation and surprise. But Falloden reported that Sorell knew everything that was intended, and approved. Otto had been very listless and depressed in town; a reaction no doubt from his spurt of work before the musical exam. Sorell thought the pleasure of the gift might rouse him, and gild the return to Oxford. CHAPTER XIX “Have some tea, old man, and warm up,” said Falloden, on his knees before a fire already magnificent, which he was endeavouring to improve. “What do you keep such a climate for?” growled Radowitz, as he hung shivering over the grate. Sorell, who had come with the boy from the station, eyed him anxiously. The bright red patches on the boy’s cheeks, and his dry, fevered look, his weakness and his depression, had revived the most sinister fears in the mind of the man who had originally lured him to Oxford, and felt himself horribly responsible for what had happened there. Yet the London doctors on the whole had been reassuring. The slight hemorrhage of the summer had had no successor; there were no further signs of active mischief; and for his general condition it was thought that the nervous shock of his accident, and the obstinate blood-poisoning which had followed it, might sufficiently account. The doctors, however, had pressed hard for sunshine and open-air—the Riviera, Sicily, or Algiers. But the boy had said vehemently that he couldn’t and wouldn’t go alone, and who could go with him? A question that for the moment stopped the way. Falloden’s first bar examination was immediately ahead; Sorell was tied to St. Cyprian’s; and every other companion so far proposed had been rejected with irritation.