"Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that
tell of saddest thought."
Then, with the curiosity of her sex, she wondered again, as she had so often wondered before, why Sir Geoffrey Holt himself had never married.
CHAPTER III.
FRAUD.
Rather more than a week elapsed, during which Melville saw practically nothing of the outer world. His chambers were at the top of the house in Jermyn Street, the suite consisting of a sitting, bed, and bath rooms, which he rented furnished for seventy pounds a year. His food and attendance were all supplied to him by the general manager of the house, and his credit for these bare necessaries of life was still good. So Melville gave orders to the hall porter to reply uniformly to all enquirers that he was not at home, and remained in his chambers steeped in dull melancholy. One evening he stole out and pawned his violin, but that very night he lost nearly all the proceeds of the transaction in some utterly foolish wager, and the next morning he woke up face to face with the fact that he only possessed ten shillings in the world. It was pouring with rain and the wind was howling round the balustrade outside his windows. Melville shivered; he felt cold and ill, and recollected that he had eaten no dinner the night before. He rang the bell and told the valet, whose services he shared with the other tenants on his floor, to bring him up some breakfast and some shaving water.
"What is the time?" he asked curtly, as the man came from his bedroom to say the shaving water was ready.
"About twelve, sir. I will bring up your breakfast in a quarter of an hour."
Melville turned to the window again. If only the rain would stop! And how he missed his violin! No human being could realise what his instrument had been to him, or what a wrench it had been to part with it. He felt utterly destitute.
"What am I to do?" he muttered vainly. "Sir Geoffrey—no, it's worse than useless to apply to him—last time was the last time, unless some marvellous inspiration helps me to pitch some plausible yarn."
While he was still harping on the one perpetual theme, the valet returned with his breakfast, and Melville drank some tea and disposed of some excellent kidneys.