comes to a man who rubs one hand against the other. Like a dram-drinker,
Stephen drank--in little doses--of the feeling these coins gave him.
They were his creative work, his history of the world. To them he
gave that side of him which refused to find its full expression in
summarising law, playing golf, or reading the reviews; that side of a
man which aches, he knows not wherefore, to construct something ere
he die. From Rameses to George IV. the coins lay within those
drawers--links of the long unbroken chain of authority.

Putting on an old black velvet jacket laid out for him across a chair,
and lighting the pipe that he could never bring himself to smoke in his
formal dinner clothes, he went to the right-hand cabinet, and opened it.
He stood with a smile, taking up coins one by one. In this particular
drawer they were of the best Byzantine dynasty, very rare. He did not
see that Cecilia had stolen in, and was silently regarding him. Her eyes
seemed doubting at that moment whether or no she loved him who stood
there touching that other mistress of his thoughts--that other mistress
with whom he spent so many evening hours. The little green-baize cover
fell. Cecilia said suddenly:

"Stephen, I feel as if I must tell Father where that girl is!"

Stephen turned.

"My dear child," he answered in his special voice, which, like
champagne, seemed to have been dried by artifice, "you don't want to
reopen the whole thing?"

"But I can see he really is upset about it; he's looking so awfully
white and thin."