They had come, however, to a policeman holding up his hand against the nose of a van horse, so that everything marked time. The engines of the cars whirred idly, their drivers’ faces set towards the space withheld from them; a girl on a bicycle looked vacantly about her, grasping the back of the van, where a youth sat sideways with his legs stretched out towards her. Sir Lawrence glanced again at young Desert. A thin, pale-dark face, good-looking, but a hitch in it, as if not properly timed; nothing outre in dress or manner, and yet socially at large; less vivacious than that lively rascal, his own son, but as anchorless, and more sceptical—might feel things pretty deeply, though! The policeman lowered his arm.

“You were in the war, Mr. Desert?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Air service?”

“And line. Bit of both.”

“Hard on a poet.”

“Not at all. Poetry’s only possible when you may be blown up at any moment, or when you live in Putney.”

Sir Lawrence’s eyebrow rose. “Yes?”

“Tennyson, Browning, Wordsworth, Swinburne—they could turn it out; ils vivaient, mais si peu.”

“Is there not a third condition favourable?”

“And that, sir?”

“How shall I express it—a certain cerebral agitation in connection with women?”

Desert’s face twitched, and seemed to darken.

Michael put his latchkey into the lock of his front door.

Chapter II.

HOME

The house in South Square, Westminster, to which the young Monts had come after their Spanish honeymoon two years before, might have been called ‘emancipated.’ It was the work of an architect whose dream was a new house perfectly old, and an old house perfectly new. It followed, therefore, no recognised style or tradition, and was devoid of structural prejudice; but it soaked up the smuts of the metropolis with such special rapidity that its stone already respectably resembled that of Wren.