"I daresay, but he doesn't look at it in that philosophical light." "You are as cynical as ever," she said with a sigh, as she arose to leave the table. "The fault of the world, as I said before," he responded, opening the door. "I would like to believe in my fellow-creatures, only they won't let me." When she had vanished, he returned to his wine, and began to ponder over her words. He saw plainly enough that she did not care about him at all, but with ingrained vanity and egotism would not admit the coldness to himself. "I'll try what a song can do," he thought, as he followed her to the drawing-room. "I can say in a song what I dare not say in plain words." Of course, Lady Errington had run up to the nursery to take a look at the baby, but shortly afterwards came down with an apology, to find Eustace seated at the piano. Outside was the luminous twilight of July, with a pale, starlit sky, arched over the prim Dutch garden. The windows were open, and a warm breath of summer, heavy with the perfume of flowers, floated into the room. The sombre trees stood black and dense against the clear sky, the garden was filled with wavering shadows, and a nightingale was singing deliciously in the heart of the still leaves as the bats glided like ghosts through the air. Lady Errington established herself in a comfortable chair near the open window, with a white wrap as a protection against the falling dews, and Eustace, sitting at the Erard, in the bright light of the lamp, ran his fingers delicately over the keys. "What can I do against that immortal music?" he said absently, alluding to the nightingale. "Hark how the bursts come crowding through the trees. What passion, and what pain." "You don't know Matthew Arnold's poems, I suppose, Lady Errington?" "Ah! you are wrong there," she replied quietly. "I am very fond of his melancholy verse." "Very melancholy," he answered musingly. "I agree with you there. I wonder, if in the whole range of English literature, there is a more bitterly true line than that famous one: "'We mortal millions live alone.'" "That is not my favourite," said Alizon dreamily, "I like that couplet: "'And bade betwixt their shores to be The unplumb'd salt estranging sea.'" "It means very much the same thing," observed Eustace after a pause, "and it's in the same poem, I think. But how true it is! Lovers, friends, married or single, we all live alone, isolated by the 'estranging sea.' No one really knows the heart of a fellow-creature." "But surely if a perfect harmony exists----" "There is always a something," said Gartney decisively, "like the perfume of a flower, the sigh of a wind, the throb of joy in the voice of a bird, that escapes us utterly. It is felt, but cannot be communicated." "A sad idea." "Very sad, but alas, very true."