servants, who seemed to regard their employers with a real but
half-contemptuous affection. He remembered the scanty, ill-cooked
luncheon; the difficulty in providing a few extra knives and forks; the
wrangling with the old _bonne_-housekeeper, which was necessary before
_serviettes_ could be produced.

And afterwards the library, with its deal shelves from floor to ceiling
put up by Dalrymple himself, its bare, polished floor, Dalrymple's table
and chair on one side of the open hearth, Lady Rose's on the other; on
his table the sheets of verse translation from Æschylus and Euripides,
which represented his favorite hobby; on hers the socialist and
economical books they both studied and the English or French poets they
both loved. The walls, hung with the faded damask of a past generation,
were decorated with a strange crop of pictures pinned carelessly into
the silk--photographs or newspaper portraits of modern men and women
representing all possible revolt against authority, political,
religious, even scientific, the Everlasting No of an untiring and
ubiquitous dissent.

Finally, in the centre of the polished floor, the strange child, whom
Lady Rose had gone to fetch after lunch, with its high crest of black
hair, its large, jealous eyes, its elfin hands, and the sudden smile
with which, after half an hour of silence and apparent scorn, it had
rewarded Sir Wilfrid's advances. He saw himself sitting bewitched
beside it.

Poor Lady Rose! He remembered her as he and she parted at the gate of
the neglected garden, the anguish in her eyes as they turned to look
after the bent and shrunken figure of Dalrymple carrying the child back
to the house.