It had been twilight when Mrs. Wylie returned home, and now it was almost dark. The two ladies sat in the warm firelight, with their feet upon the fender. Tea laid aside, they continued sitting there while the flames leapt and fell again, glowing on their thoughtful faces, gleaming on the simple jewellery at their throats. From the restless streets came a dull, continuous roar as of the sea. I hear it now as I write, and would fain lay aside the pen and wonder over it; for it rises and falls, swells and dies again, with a long, slow, mournful rhythm full of life, and yet joyless; soporific, and yet alive with movement. There is no sound on earth like it except the hopeless song of breaking waves. Both alike steal upon the senses with an indefinable suggestion of duration, almost amounting to a glimmer of what is called eternity. Both alike reach the heart with a subtle, undeniable lovableness. Londoners and sailors cannot resist its music, for both return to it in their age, whithersoever they may have wandered.
Mrs. Wylie it was who moved at last, rising with characteristic determination, as if the pastime of thought were a vice not wisely encouraged. She stood before Brenda in her widow's weeds, looking down through the dim light with a faint smile.
'Come,' she said; 'we must get ready for dinner. Remember that Mrs. Hicks is going to call for you at eight o'clock to take you to that Ancient Artists' Guild soirée. I should put on a white dress if I were you, and violets. The gifted William Hicks, whom we met in the Park this afternoon, asked what flowers he should bring, and I suggested violets.'
Brenda laughed suddenly, but her hilarity finished in a peculiar, abrupt way.
'Telle est la vie!' she murmured, as she rose obediently. 'What a labour this enjoyment sometimes is!'
CHAPTER VII.
QUICKSANDS.
'Wot's this—runaway couple?' asked a pallid and slipshod waiter of his equally-unwholesome colleague in the dining-room attached to a large City railway-station.
'D'no,' answered the second, with weary indifference; 'we don't offen see that sort down 'ere.'
'There's a sort,' continued the first attendant, pulling down his soup-stained waistcoat, 'o' haristocratic simplicity about them and their wants as pleases my poetic and 'igh-born soul.'