did. If you have been spared a great load of pain, you may take my word

for it that it’s Louise you have to thank.”

Keble was pale. In his eyes was the look which Miriam had seen on another occasion, just before the birth of his son. “Then I do wish,” he quietly said, “that my friends would do me the kindness to point out some of my most inexcusable limitations, instead of letting me walk through life in a fool’s paradise.”

Miriam was ready to retort that even such a wish reflected the _amour propre_ that determined most of his acts, but she had been touched by the emotion in his eyes and voice,—an emotion which only one woman could inspire. “I think we’re all trying desperately to learn the ABC’s of life,” she said.

She was unnerved by the self-abasement that had stolen into his expression. For the first time in her life she went close to him and took his hand in hers. “Don’t mind if I’ve spoken like a preacher,” she pleaded in a voice which she could control just long enough to finish her counsel. “The sermon is directed at my own heart even more than yours.”

He returned the pressure of her hands absent-mindedly, and she sought refuge in her room.

Keble was restless and turned towards the library through force of habit. A book was lying face down on the arm of his chair, but after reading several sentences without hearing what they were saying, he got up and poured himself a glass of whisky.

He would have gone to the piano, but Miriam’s superior musicianship had given him a distaste for his own performances. He wandered through the drawing-room to the dimly-lit hall, and found himself before the gramaphone. Every one had gone to bed, but if he closed the shutters of the box the sound would not be loud enough to disturb the household. At haphazard he chose a record from a new supply.

A song of Purcell’s. He threw himself into a deep chair. The opening bars of the accompaniment were gentle and tranquilizing, with naïve cadenza. A naïve seventeenth century melody, which was taken up by a pretty voice: high, clear, pure.

_Those words!_ He leaned forward, and listened more intently.

“I attempt from love’s sickness to fly—in vain—for I am myself my own fever—for I am myself my own fever and pain.”

As though a ghost had stolen into the dark room, Keble started slowly from his chair. His eyes riveted on the machine, he paused, then abruptly reached forward to stop it, inadvertently causing the needle to slide across the disk with a sound that might have been the shriek of a dying man.

For a long while he stood holding the disk. Only when he became conscious of the startled beating of his heart did he throw off the spell.

He was staring at the record in his hands—the ghost. He dreaded the noise that would be made if he were to drop it on the floor,—even if he were to lay it down carefully and snap it with his heel.

He got up swiftly, unbolted the door, and walked out in the cold air to the end of the terrace, past the stone parapet, down the grassy slope to a point overhanging the shore of the lake. Far, far away, through the blackness, were tiny points of light, marking the location of the Browns’ cottage. His eyes sought a gleam farther along the shore, but there was nothing in all that blackness to indicate Miriam’s old cabin.

They were there, perhaps asleep, perhaps wearily wakeful, with only their souls left to fight for them against some vague, sinister enemy. Perhaps she was watching over him as he slept; preparing his draughts; stirring the fire with a little shiver. Perhaps she, too, had been approached by spectres. Perhaps she was ill, despairing, afraid. Tears came into his eyes.

He could feel the disk pressing against his fingers, and the tiny hard rills through which the needle had traced its uncanny message.

“What do you know of the sick man!” Above the mysterious silence of the night a phantom voice, thin, clear, dainty, was singing the answer into his understanding: “I attempt from love’s sickness to fly, in vain; for I am myself my own fever and pain.” It could so airily sing, as though it were a toy song and a toy sentiment, words which were as irrelevantly indicative as flowers nodding over a grave.

Many years ago he and Walter had played a game called “scaling”. You chose round, flat pieces of slate and sent them whirling through the air.

He scaled, and waited for the splashing sound far out on the water.

Poor little record, it had meant well enough.