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 stick. The butler caught them, and led him through thick fog to the drawing room, leaving him there to wait for Christabel.

He waited.

The fog began to lift. He looked about him. Things, material possessions! Only a bird in a gilded cage, he sang in his mind with bitter mirth, for he and Donatia and Boyd and Gobby were finding old songs rather amusing that autumn. A butler, tapestries, silver and lace on the table before the fire—what an absurd scale of values they implied. And yet there were people who were impressed by such things.

Poor Christabel. So she has come to this, he thought, contrasting the huge sheaves of chrysanthemums like helpings of crab salad, the Madonna drenched in brown gravy, with that other firelit room of hers, exquisite and simple—one perfect rose, his portrait of her alone on the wall.

Was she coming? No, not yet. But his heart began to thud. What should his first