"Vincent," she said, making one last despairing effort to bring things back to their former footing, "when are you going to ask Louie Drexel and me to dine with you at the House?"
"I’m so busy, aunt, just now," said he, as he opened the door for her. Then he saw her into her carriage; and she drove away—a most perplexed and unhappy woman.
These rooms that Vincent had taken at the foot of Buckingham-street were right up at the top of the building; and commanded a spacious prospect of the river, the Embankment gardens, the bridges, the great dusky world of London lying all around, and the dome of St. Paul’s rising dim and phantasmal in the east. They were bachelor chambers, that had doubtless seen many tenants (the name of one, George Brand, was still over the door, and Vincent did not think it worth while to change it), but the young man had no sooner entered into possession than he began a series of alterations and improvements that bachelor chambers did not seem to demand. Not in any hurry, however; nor perhaps with any fixed intent; it was a kind of amusement for this or that odd half-hour he could snatch from his multifarious duties. To begin with, he had the woodwork painted a deep Indian red, and the walls a pearly-blue grey: while the former colour was repeated in the Japanese window-curtains, and the latter by the great world outside, on the lambent moonlight nights, or sometimes in the awakening of the dawn, as he lay in a low easy-chair, and watched the vast, silent city coming out of its sleep. This top-floor was a very still place, except for the early chattering of the tree-sparrows, into whose nests, swaying on the branches just beneath him, he could have tossed a biscuit. And then his peregrinations through London, rapid though they were as a rule, occasionally brought him face-to-face with a bric-a-brac shop; and from time to time he picked up one thing or another, just as it happened to strike his fancy. Perhaps these modest purchases were just a trifle too elegant for a bachelor’s apartments; the sitting-room away up in that lofty situation came to look rather like a boudoir; for example, there was a music-stand in rosewood and ormulu—a tall stand it was, as if for a violin player—which he himself never used. Pictures he could not afford; but books he could; and the volumes which were one by one added to those shelves were of a more graceful and literary stamp than you would have expected to find in the library of a young and busy member of Parliament. It was not a lordly palace of art, this humble suite of apartments in the neighbourhood of the Strand; but there was a prevailing air of selection and good taste; perhaps, one ought to say, of expectancy, also, in the presence of things not yet in use. Then the two large and low windows of the sitting-room were all surrounded with ivy, of long training; but besides that, there were flower-boxes; and at a moment’s notice, and at small expense, these could be filled with potted geraniums, if one wished to be gay. And always outside was the varied panorama of the mighty city; the wide river and the bridges, the spires and the towers, the far masses of buildings becoming more and more spectral as they receded into the grey and wavering mist. Sometimes the rose and saffron of the dawn were there, ascending with a soft suffusion behind the purple dome of St. Paul’s; sometimes there were blown and breezy days, with flying showers and watery gleams of sunlight; and sometimes the night lay blue and still and clear, the Surrey side in black and mysterious shadow, the white moon high in the south. These silent altitudes were a fine place for dreaming, after all the toil and moil of the working-hours were over; and a fine place for listening, too; sometimes, towards the morning, just as the leaves began to stir, you could fancy the wind was bringing a message with it—it seemed, coming from far away, to say something about _Claire Fontaine_.