He had just finished dressing when the sound of a girl’s voice drew him to the window, which was open. In the garden stood Rose, on the edge of the sunk fence dividing the Rectory domain from the cornfield. She was stooping forward playing with Robert’s Dandie Dinmont. In one hand she held a mass of poppies, which showed a vivid scarlet against her blue dress; the other was stretched out seductively to the dog leaping round her. A crystal buckle flashed at her waist; the sunshine caught the curls of auburn hair, the pink cheek, the white moving hand, the lace ruffles at her throat and wrist. The lithe, glittering figure stood thrown out against the heavy woods behind, the gold of the cornfield, the blues of the distance. All the gayety and color which is as truly representative of autumn as the gray languor of a September mist had passed into it. Langham stood and watched, hidden, as he thought, by the curtain, till a gust of wind shook the casement window beside him, and threatened to blow it in upon him. He put out his hand perforce to save it, and the slight noise caught Rose’s ear. She looked up; her smile vanished. ‘Go down, Dandie,’ she said severely, and walked quickly into the house with as much dignity as nineteen is capable of. At breakfast the Elsmeres found their guest a difficulty. But they also, as we know, had expected it. He was languor itself; none of their conversational efforts succeeded; and Rose, studying him out the corners of her eyes, felt that it would be of no use even to torment so strange and impenetrable a being. Why on earth should people come and visit their friends, if they could not keep up even the ordinary decent pretences of society? Robert had to go off to some clerical business afterward and Langham wandered out into the garden by himself. As he thought of his Greek texts and his untenanted Oxford rooms, he had the same sort of craving that an opium-eater has cut off from his drugs. How was he to get through? Presently he walked back into the study, secured an armful of volumes, and carried them out. True to himself in the smallest things, he could never in his life be content with the companionship of one book. To cut off the possibility of choice and change in anything whatever was repugnant to him. He sat himself down in the shade of a great chestnut near the house, and an hour glided pleasantly away. As it happened, however, he did not open one of the books he had brought with him. A thought had struck him as he sat down, and he went groping in his pockets in search of a yellow-covered brochure, which, when found, proved to be a new play by Dumas, just about to be produced by a French company in London. Langham, whose passion for the French theatre supplied him, as we know, with a great deal of life, without the trouble of living, was going to see it, and always made a point of reading the piece beforehand.