talked considerably less than before. There were longish pauses in
our communion, but they only made me feel we had advanced in
intimacy. They helped me further to understand my friend's personal
situation and to imagine it by no means the happiest possible. When
his face was quiet it was vaguely troubled, showing, to my increase
of interest--if that was all that was wanted!--that for him too life
was the same struggle it had been for so many another man of genius.
At last I prepared to leave him, and then, to my ineffable joy, he
gave me some of the sheets of his forthcoming book--which, though
unfinished, he had indulged in the luxury, so dear to writers of
deliberation, of having "set up," from chapter to chapter, as he
advanced. These early pages, the premices, in the language of
letters, of that new fruit of his imagination, I should take to my
room and look over at my leisure. I was in the act of leaving him
when the door of the study noiselessly opened and Mrs. Ambient stood
before us. She observed us a moment, her candle in her hand, and
then said to her husband that as she supposed he hadn't gone to bed
she had come down to let him know Dolcino was more quiet and would
probably be better in the morning. Mark Ambient made no reply; he
simply slipped past her in the doorway, as if for fear she might
seize him in his passage, and bounded upstairs to judge for himself
of his child's condition. She looked so frankly discomfited that I
for a moment believed her about to give him chase. But she resigned
herself with a sigh and her eyes turned, ruefully and without a ray,
to the lamplit room where various books at which I had been looking
were pulled out of their places on the shelves and the fumes of
tobacco hung in mid-air. I bade her good-night and then, without
intention, by a kind of fatality, a perversity that had already made
me address her overmuch on that question of her husband's powers, I
alluded to the precious proof-sheets with which Ambient had entrusted