"Very well; your Grace knows best."
And the agent went his way.
CHAPTER X
"DEAD NUTS"
It was three o'clock in the early morning of the twentieth of August. A single jet of gas, lighting a torch in the mailed hand of a life-size man-at-arms, burnt audibly in the silent hall; making the worst of each lugubrious feature, like a match struck in a cavern. And Claude Lafont was sitting up alone, in the Poet's Corner, at work upon his birthday offering to Olivia Sellwood.
At three, however, it was finished in the rough. The poet then stretched his fingers, took a clean sheet of paper, and started upon the fair copy in his prettiest hand. It began—
"What songs have I to sing you?
What tales have I to tell?"
And there it stuck, as though these questions were indeed unanswerable; the fact being, there was another still to come, which, however, involved an execrable couplet as it stood. Claude twisted it about for half-an-hour; realised its gratuitous badness; tried not to ask this inane question at all, hunted his rhyming dictionary up and down, and found he must; and finally, with a prayer that it might impose upon Olivia, and another for forgiveness from the Muse, finished his first stanza with—
"What garlands can I bring you
From Fancy's fairest dell?
Before the world grew old, dear,
The lute was lightlier strung;
Now all the tales are told, dear,
And all the songs are sung."