On ordinary days the shop was shut at eight, but when Willy and Frank dined there it was closed an hour earlier. Frank enjoyed his evenings there; he enjoyed it all--the homeliness and the quiet. He enjoyed seeing Willy nurse the missus after dinner, and he found no difficulty in pretending a certain interest in the book-keeping, and an admiration for the lines of figures all carefully formed, and the beautifully ruled lines. Cissy adored him. He took her on his knee, and she leaned her hollow cheek against his handsome face. She would have probably rushed to death to serve him. His height, his brightness, his rings, his spotted neckties--all seemed so perfect, so beautiful, to her; and when he brought his fiddle she would sit and look at him, her little hands clasped with an intensity of love that was strange and pitiful. Swaying from side to side, he ran on from tune to tune--waltzes, reminiscences from operas, fragments of overtures, delightful snatches from Schubert; and when he introduced Willy to one tune--a tune in which all his _might-have-been_ was bound--the dry man seemed to grow drier: perhaps it brought a glow of pleasure to his heart: but be this as it may, he only sat and puffed more emphatically at his pipe. XI For Frank this pleasant English village was now a happy _fete_ of summer joys and occupations. Oh! the hill prospects and the shady gardens around the coasts. And when he went inland he would return by choice across the Downs, and in the patriarchal valleys where nothing is heard but the bell-wether he would stand in the great, lonely darkness, and see the lights of Brighton brighten the sky above the ridges, and climbing up the ridges, he gazed on the vague sea, and the long string of coast towns were like a golden necklace. His days went like dreams. The morning hours--bachelor hours--were full of intimacy and joy. The joy of waking alone with a strange and secret self that, like a shy bird, is all the day chased out of sight and hearing, but is with you when you awake in sweet health in the morning; that of waking alone with the sunlight in the curtains, that of being alone with your body as well as your mind, and no presence to jar the communion. There is a dear privacy in morning hours of single life.