“_Don’t_ you remember the four little gentle tuneless phrases, of six and seven notes alternately, one for each quarter, and at the hour sounding one after the other with a little pause between each, seeming to ask you to look at what it saw, at the various life of the town made suddenly wonderful and strange; and the last phrase, beginning with a small high note that tapped the sky, and wandering down to the level and stopping without emphasis, leaving everything at peace and very beautiful.” “I think I _can’t_ have heard it,” he said wistfully and sat contemplative in a little pause during which it occurred to her, becoming aware of the two of them talking on and on into the morning that it rested with her to wind up the sitting; that he might perhaps, if not quite immediately, yet in intention be waiting for her to rise and spare him the apparent discourtesy of pleading an engagement. Even failing the engagement they could not sit here forever, and the convention of his world demanded that she should be the first to go. She had just time to note coming from far away within herself a defiance that would sooner inflict upon him the discomfort of breaking the rule than upon herself the annoyance of moving at its bidding, when he looked across and said with the bowing attitude he had held last night as he spoke and waited for her to become aware of him: “May I put you up for the ski-club?” It was, of course, his business to cultivate new people, and, if they seemed suitable, to collect them.... She smiled acknowledgment and insincerely pleaded the shortness of her stay. All she could do, short of blurting out her poverty which he seemed not to have seen. But a fortnight was, he declared, the ideal time: time to learn and to get on well enough to want to come out again next year; and hurried on to promise a fellow sufferer, a friend coming up, for only a few days, from the South, who would be set immediately to work and on whose account he was committed to-day to trek down to the station. “We were,” he said, for the first time looking across almost before he spoke, and with the manner now of making a direct important communication, “at Cambridge together.” A valued friend, being introduced, recommended, put before himself. Warmth crept into his voice, and lively emphasis—compressed into a small note of distress. That note was his social utmost, for gravity and for joy; recalling Selina Holland—when she was deeply moved: a wailing tone, deprecating, but in his tone was more wistfulness, a suggestion too of anxiety. It had begun when he spoke of Pater’s Renaissance Studies, but had then merely sounded into the golden light, intensifying it. Now it seemed to flout the light, flout everything but his desire to express the absent friend. “That was some years ago. Since then he has been a very busy man, saying to this one go and he goeth ...” He smiled across as if asking her to share the strangeness of his friend’s metamorphosis.