When the mysterious Mr. P. quitted the room, Henry felt that his lightly-chosen epithet was more suitable than ever. But it was less of the man he thought, as he now unconsciously imitated him in pacing his room, than of the ideas he had enunciated; these had instantly become detached from their originator and boiled up in Henry's mind with all the lees of youthful doubts and questionings that had been lying there. The mental ferment had a harassing effect on him. Almost for the first time in his life he felt a strange desire to turn inside out his spiritual nature and find what it consisted of. And the next instant the thought was madness to him. "I said to him that we are told to love one another," he reflected, setting his teeth defiantly. "If we did, then evil would cease out of the world. So the religion which teaches this must be right. But we don't do so--he was right there--and if our natures are not capable of this love, what profits the advice? He's no fool; but the way seems very dark. I half wish he hadn't touched the subject." As these thoughts were coursing through Henry's mind, the strains of a 'cello, soothing and sensuous, came from the room above, adding a dramatic touch to a memorable experience, and reminding him startlingly that he had never spoken a word to Mr. P. about his music. The lateness of the hour surprised Henry, who threw himself down in a chair and stared blankly at the dying embers in the grate, while the musician sounded with exquisite touch the closing bars of a nocturne. CHAPTER XVI DRIFTING WHEN Henry's review of "Ashes" appeared, it was not so violent an attack on the author as he had meant it to be. Indeed, he was half-ashamed when he read in print what he had written about that much-discussed book; in certain passages it sounded suspiciously like Mr. P.'s own phrases. "We shall admit that it is no business of art to concern itself with morals." Where did we hear the words before? "It is, alas, only too true that life is not all sweetness: it has more than a dash of bitter." A platitude; and borrowed at that. "But we must not suppose that only beauty is true and artistic: ugliness may still be of the very essence of art." Really, the fiddler fellow might have done the review himself. No doubt, when he read it, he felt that it was mainly his. Henry had yet to discover that the opinions he gave forth with so much pomp and circumstance had been unconsciously pilfered. The mind of every young man is an unblushing thief. It drifts into honest ways in due time, however, and when it does not, the aged plagiarist may argue that he still remains young. In a word, the influence of Mr. Puddephatt fell upon Henry at a most critical moment in his zigzag journey towards sober common-sense, and the modified tone of the review indicated a similar change in the inner thoughts of the young journalist--too sudden, perhaps, to be alarming.