murs and the patter of white gloves, he saw the blonde prince advancing across the shiny space
Suddenly he broke the spell and cast a furtive glance toward the end of the table. There was Aunt Verona, quite old-looking, over forty, her dark eyes burning, her face drained of colour, her lips tightly pressed together, her grey-streaked hair parted in a manner that recalled the picture of the lady who had written Daniel Deronda, her figure muffled in a green woollen dressing-jacket, her cramped, cold, scarred, veined, nervous, bony fingers racing across the page.
He got up from his seat and went to throw himself down on a sofa in the dark playroom. His departure was unnoticed. Life was vast and terrifying: a great stormy adventure illuminated by brief flashes which only accentuated the blackness. One would go on groping, always groping, for ever and ever, alone. An endless fugue that got harder and harder to play. One could not hope even to trace the line of the theme, much less master the intricacies of subsidiary voices.
To-night he knew he would have to keep his back pressed against the wall all the way up the dark stairs.
When Aunt Verona was not given over to the fever of writing, she moved about in a cloud, working mechanically, or staring through the playroom window at nothing. In bewildering sallies she emerged from her abstraction and returned to the old routine, making hot scones, mending stockings and mittens, sweeping, polishing, dusting, asking questions, and presiding over the early-morning music lesson. These intervals, however, found Paul unresponsive, for he had adapted his manner to Aunt Verona's growing impersonality and found it difficult to step out of his shell without warning.
Thrown on his own resources, he had become preco-
