“Ah—perhaps,” laughed Josephine. “I came upon a letter of his the other day in a magazine—a letter written from his cottage on the Fulham Road to his stepson, who lived here, asking him to come to hear the nightingale that sung every night in one of the lanes.”
“There are other places besides the lanes off the Fulham Road where one may listen to the song of the nightingale nowadays,” said Mr. Clifton.
“His example should be a warning to a man not to marry beneath him,” remarked Josephine.
“Yes, it was rather a come down for him, wasn’t it?” said her companion. “He lived in a garret off the Haymarket, didn’t he?—and his wife brought him here.”
“He was the greatest writer of his time, and she was only a Countess,” said Josephine.
“Quite so. But they lived very happily apart, so that it was not such a misalliance after all,” said Clifton. “I suppose it was one of Dr. Johnson’s customary brutalities to say that the man died from that insidious form of heredity known in recent diagnoses as habitual alcoholism.”
“The notion is horrid—quite worthy of Dr. Johnson,” said Josephine, making a move as if to rejoin another sparkling group.
“Don’t let us separate for a minute yet,” said Clifton. “Though I admit that you are very properly cautious, still there are limits: we have not been together, so that we could talk, for some weeks. Since then I got a letter from you.”
“I have been very unhappy, Ernest,” said she, gazing into the distance of the lovely woodland.
“Not more unhappy than I have been, my dearest,” said he. “Was that letter of yours calculated to allay my unhappiness, do you think? It made me doubly unhappy because it made me aware of your unhappiness.”