The time and the place invited to literary composition. The time was shortly after ten o’clock of a warm spring night, for the Castle retired early. The place was a room which David Grant had sometimes imagined for himself as the background for a scene in a novel, but never yet had the satisfaction of occupying. It was a great state Tudor bedroom, with carved and panelled walls, a stone fireplace with a fire of logs burning in it, Flemish tapestry above, a polished oak floor with old carpets in front of the hearth, by the heavy pillared canopied bed and in the deep embrasure of the window. There were heavy oak chairs and tables and presses. The washing arrangements, necessarily more modern, since in Tudor days they washed very little, were in a closet apart. The writing-table alone showed modernity, with everything on it in the way of apparatus that could please a person who loved writing for its own sake, and could appreciate its accessories. It stood in the windowed recess, which was as large as a fair-sized room, and contained another table for books, with a cushioned chair by its side, and still left space for moving about from one window to the other. Wax candles in heavy silver candle-sticks stood invitingly on the writing-table, and elsewhere about the room. There were six of these lit when David Grant came up, but it was so large that the effect was still one of rich dimness, warmed into life by the glowing fire on the hearth. David Grant’s soul was full of content as he came into the room and shut the heavy door behind him. If he couldn’t write a letter in this atmosphere that would eventually read well in his biography, he wasn’t worth his salt. He was not without occasional qualms as to whether he actually was worth his salt as a novelist, but none of them troubled him to-night. He was wakeful and alert; he had half a mind to sit down at that inviting silver-laden table and write a chapter of "A Love Apart." But no. Ethel, poor girl, must come first. He felt tender towards her; they were going to be so happy together at Royd. And, after all, this was a chapter in the story of their own lives, and more interesting to both of them than a chapter in the lives of fictitious characters. He took off his coat and put on the flannel jacket in which he was accustomed to write. Then he went to the windows and drew back all the heavy curtains, and opened one of the casements. His facile emotions, always ready to be stirred by beauty, and to turn it immediately into words, were stirred for a moment into something that he could not have put into words as he stood there, though they came to him the moment afterwards as he recognized how it all fitted in with the impression encouraged in his mind by the old rich room in the old castle—the moonlight outside, silvering the fairy glades of the park into mysterious beauty, the silence and the sweet scents of the slumbering earth.