"To-night we were to say good-bye. We were to have parted at the door in Great Ormond Street; but, standing on the doorstep, waiting for the opening of that inexorable door, which would swallow her up presently, like a tomb, I felt all at once that I could not sacrifice this last evening. Standish was dining out. There would only be loneliness and a roast chicken awaiting me at half-past seven. The chicken might languish, uneaten; the ghosts might have the dull, commonplace room; I would finish the evening with Martha's tea and toast, and hear Esperanza sing her favourite numbers of Handel and Mendelssohn, to the accompaniment of an ancient Stoddart piano, a relic of the schoolroom in my Suffolk home, the piano on which my mother took her first music-lesson. "It was an evening in Elysium. A back parlour is sometimes large enough to contain paradise. I did not question my own heart, or analyze my beatific sensations. I ascribed at least half my happiness to Handel and Mendelssohn, and that feeling of exaltation which only sacred music can produce. There were no anxious questionings in my mind till after I had said good-bye to Esperanza--good-bye, till the third week in December--and had left the house. Those uneasy questionings were inspired by my dear old Martha, who opened the hall door for me, and said gravely, as I shook hands with her-- "'It would never do, Mr. George. I know what kind of lady your mother is, as well as anybody. It would never do.' "I did not ask her what it was that would never do; but I carried a new sense of trouble and difficulty out into the autumn wind. CHAPTER IX. "A WHITE STAR MADE OF MEMORY LONG AGO." "'It would never do.' Those words of Martha's--so earnestly spoken by the kind soul who cared for me almost as tenderly as a mother cares for her own--haunted me all through the rapid run to Cambridge, walked the quadrangles of Trinity with me, tramped the Trumpington Road upon my shoulders, like that black care which sits behind the traveller. 'It would never do.' No need to ask my good Martha for the meaning of that emphatic assertion. I knew what shape her thoughts had taken as she watched me sitting by the little square piano--the old, old piano, with such a thin, tinkling sound--listening to that seraphic voice, and looking at that delicate profile and exquisite colouring of faintly flushed cheek, lifted eye, and shadowy hair. My old nurse had surprised my secret almost before I knew it myself; but, by the time I was back in my shabby ground-floor sitting-room at Trinity, I knew as well as Martha knew that I had let myself fall deep in love with a girl whom I could never marry with my mother's approbation. I might take my own way in life and marry the girl I loved; but to do so would be to forfeit my mother's affection, to make myself an outcast from her house. "'I know what kind of a lady your mother is,' said Martha, in her valedictory address.