The doctor gave his promise as a breathless young woman in cap and apron came to summon him upstairs.
“Good-night, Felix.”
“I shall be here when you come down, doctor.”
Felix, characteristically, would always be there, the doctor reflected. In all the years during which the doctor had come to Ovington Street, the many times that he had brought Rose there, or taken her away, Felix had always been there, unbolting the door for her, fetching the cab for her, breathlessly echoing her greeting or her farewell, gazing upon her with faithful adoration, and going back to his dark corner of the shop to dream his wild, cinematographic day-dreams of unlikely prowess on her behalf.
“Where is the line of demarcation?” Lucian wondered sadly to himself. “This lad’s fancies may be foolish enough, but it’s a rather sublime sort of folly, and unspeakably pathetic; and that other poor boy, who dragged his day-dreams into everyday life—it’s only a step further, after all.... And yet one’s something of a hero, and the other——”
He would not supply the word, even to himself.
On the way upstairs, a very odd sound, familiar in an elusive sort of way, perplexed him for an instant. He opened the door of the sitting-room.
The frail, fatuous, tinkling sound was intensified. It was an air, the air called “Rousseau’s Dream,” played by an old-fashioned musical box.
It stood on the round table in the middle of the room, where a space had been cleared for it beside the aspidistra and the big Bible. Over the gas-fire, Alfred Smith was sitting, looking strangely chilled and old.
“Rousseau’s Dream” died away in a little blur of sound as the mechanism ran down, and old Smith looked up.