It was about five in the afternoon when she heard a ring at the door and the editor’s brother’s voice in the hall. Poetess as she was, or as she thought herself, she had not been too sublime that day to dress with infinite trouble in a fashionable robe of rich material, having a faint resemblance to the _chiton_ of the Greeks, a style just then in vogue among ladies of an artistic and romantic turn, which had been obtained by Ella of her Bond Street dressmaker when she was last in London. Her visitor entered the drawing-room. She looked towards his rear; nobody else came through the door. Where, in the name of the God of Love, was Robert Trewe? ‘O, I’m sorry,’ said the painter, after their introductory words had been spoken. ‘Trewe is a curious fellow, you know, Mrs. Marchmill. He said he’d come; then he said he couldn’t. He’s rather dusty. We’ve been doing a few miles with knapsacks, you know; and he wanted to get on home.’ ‘He—he’s not coming?’ ‘He’s not; and he asked me to make his apologies.’ ‘When did you p-p-part from him?’ she asked, her nether lip starting off quivering so much that it was like a _tremolo_-stop opened in her speech. She longed to run away from this dreadful bore and cry her eyes out. ‘Just now, in the turnpike road yonder there.’ ‘What! he has actually gone past my gates?’ ‘Yes. When we got to them—handsome gates they are, too, the finest bit of modern wrought-iron work I have seen—when we came to them we stopped, talking there a little while, and then he wished me good-bye and went on. The truth is, he’s a little bit depressed just now, and doesn’t want to see anybody. He’s a very good fellow, and a warm friend, but a little uncertain and gloomy sometimes; he thinks too much of things. His poetry is rather too erotic and passionate, you know, for some tastes; and he has just come in for a terrible slating from the —— _Review_ that was published yesterday; he saw a copy of it at the station by accident. Perhaps you’ve read it?’ ‘No.’ ‘So much the better. O, it is not worth thinking of; just one of those articles written to order, to please the narrow-minded set of subscribers upon whom the circulation depends. But he’s upset by it. He says it is the misrepresentation that hurts him so; that, though he can stand a fair attack, he can’t stand lies that he’s powerless to refute and stop from spreading. That’s just Trewe’s weak point. He lives so much by himself that these things affect him much more than they would if he were in the bustle of fashionable or commercial life. So he wouldn’t come here, making the excuse that it all looked so new and monied—if you’ll pardon—’ ‘But—he must have known—there was sympathy here! Has he never said anything about getting letters from this address?’ ‘Yes, yes, he has, from John Ivy—perhaps a relative of yours, he thought, visiting here at the time?’ ‘Did he—like Ivy, did he say?’ ‘Well, I don’t know that he took any great interest in Ivy.’ ‘Or in his poems?’