"I'm not the sort of man to be a bachelor," he said to himself earnestly, somewhere about midnight that evening, as he leaned out of his bedroom window and smoked a cigarette meditatively. "Some fellows ought never to marry; I told Dick Stephens so when he got engaged, and he was separated from his wife within a year of their marriage. But I am not like Dick Stephens. I am really a most domesticated sort of man, and it is time I settled down. I am tired of being a Bohemian; every wretched little pygmy who writes ballads and lets his hair grow and doesn't wash, is a Bohemian. And there is the boy, too; he ought to have a mother of course, poor little chap: we both want a woman about us, don't we, Sonny? Yes, there is no doubt that it is my duty to Sonny to marry very soon."
In the room above, among the cushions on the sofa, lay Lady Joan with her hair down and a fan in her hand, opposite a full-length mirror; in her most secret moments Lady Joan liked to assure herself that she played the part picturesquely.
"I like him. He is fresh, and original, and amusing. He doesn't bore me, and I can flirt with him--safely. He has no theories about things, and he does not want to upset creation, and he doesn't take life so desperately seriously. It is such a blessing to meet some one who is content with the age as it is--bah! what a smell of tobacco smoke!"
And she rose, shut the window with a bang, and went to bed, where she slept soundly till the morning.
"It is curious," murmured the musician, lighting another cigarette, "how Fate seems to have propelled her towards me at every crisis of my life; just after Mary died, for instance, and again before I met Norah!--poor little Norah! and then again the other day, when I really had made up my mind to go to Africa, and she came back from the Continent in time to prevent me. And now--ah, I believe I could write that song now."
And he went to the writing-table and tried to set some impassioned words of Swinburne to music; but although the situation demanded that he should have been specially inspired, he found himself incapable of writing a note, and had to give up the task in despair.
"My brain is overwrought; I am not going to sleep to-night," he said, and put the bromide by his bedside.