And so they went upstairs and opened up the aloof room, with its persistent and insular odor of the Sabbath and antimacassars, and drew up chairs to the window. The row of houses opposite, which had been converted into shops, was bathed in the afternoon sun. A florist’s windows alight with flowers looked like a line from Tennyson in the middle of a financial article in a newspaper. Traffic roared in the street below but did not quite succeed in drowning a weather-beaten piano accompanying a throaty baritone singing, “She dwelt amid the untrodden wiys.—And h’oh the differ-rence ter me.” With a thoughtfulness that seemed to Ernest Treadwell to be exquisite, Lola shut the window so that she might not miss a single word that she was about to hear. Without any preliminaries and with the colossal egotism that is part and parcel of all writing, the young librarian took from his pocket a wad of manuscript, and in a deadly monotone commenced to read his epic. It was in blank verse and ran to about sixteen pages. It retold the old story of Paola and Francesca, not in the manner of Stephen Phillips and not in imitation of Masefield or any of the younger poets, but in the Treadwell way,—jerky, explosive and here and there out of key; but for all that filled with a rough picturesqueness and passion, with a quite extraordinary sense of color and feeling which held Lola breathless from beginning to end. It was this boy’s greatest effort, on which he had been working for innumerable months, burning the midnight oil with the influence of Lola upon him, and his great love which lifted him into ecstasy.—And when he had finished and ventured to look into her face, he saw there something that crowned his head with laurels and filled his heart with tears. “Oh,” she said. “Oh.—Ernie, you’ve done it. It’s beautiful. You are a poet. However far behind them all, you are in the line of great singers.” And she reached out for the manuscript and saw that on the first page, in angular boyish writing, were the words, “To Lola,—of whom I dream.” Simpkins, Treadwell, Chalfont,—but, oh, where was Fallaray, her hero, the man who needed love? IV When Feo bounced into her room a little after five-thirty she found a perfectly composed and efficient Lola who had laid out a selection of her mistress’s most recent frocks with the accompanying shoes and stockings. There was nothing about the girl to indicate her latent excitement and her determination under any circumstances to keep her appointment at the Carlton. The cardboard box from Mrs. Rumbold’s was up in her room. Ellen had been interviewed and had promised to slip down and open the area door at twelve o’clock.