Well, he was glad to find his old friend and comrade, Nina, getting on so well and so proud of her success and looking so charming in her new part; and he guessed that she must have written to the grumbling old Pandiani, and sent photographs of herself as Grace Mainwaring to Andrea and Carmela and her other Neapolitan friends.  But it was not of Nina that he thought long, as he lay in the easy-chair and smoked, and listened to the heavy murmur of the streets without.  He had not got used to London yet.  The theatre seemed to him a great, glaring thing; the lime-light an impertinent sham; even the applause of the delighted audience somehow brutal and offensive.  There was no repose, no reticence, no self-respect and modesty about the whole affair; it was all too violent; a fanfaronade; a coarse and ostentatious make-believe, that seemed a kind of insult to a quiet mind.  He turned away from it altogether.  His fancies had fled to the North again; the long railway journey was annihilated; again he was driving out to the still and beautiful valley, where those kind friends were standing at the door of the lodge, fluttering a white welcome to him.  He goes down the steep hillside; he crosses the stream at the Horse’s Drink; he reaches the hall-door and is shaking hands with this one and that.  And if the tall, proud maiden with the fine forehead and the clear, calm hazel eyes is not among this group, be sure she will be here in the evening to add her greeting to the rest.  Oh, to think of that next morning—­the sweet air blowing down from the hills—­the silver lights among the purple clouds—­the Aivron swinging along its gravelly bed, a deep, clear bronze where the sunlight strikes the shallows!  Farther and farther into the solitudes these two idly wander—­away from human ken—­until the dogs in the kennels are no longer heard, nor is there even a black-cock crowing in the woods; nothing but the hum of the bees, and the whisper of the birch branches, and the hushed, low thunder of the Geinig falls.  He could almost hear it now; or was not the continuous murmur that dazed and dinned his ears a sadly different sound—­the muffled roar of cabs and carriages along Piccadilly, bearing home this teeming population from the blare and glare of the crowded theatres?  A different sound indeed!  He had come into another world; and the Aivron and Geinig, far away, were alone with the darkness and the stars.

CHAPTER XIV.

A MAGNANIMOUS RIVAL.

That Monday night at the New Theatre was a great occasion; for, although there were a few people (themselves not of much account, perhaps) who went about saying there was no one in London, an enormous house welcomed back to the stage those well-known favorites, Miss Burgoyne and Mr. Lionel Moore.  And what had become of the Aivron and the Geinig now?—­their distant murmurs were easily drowned in the roar of enthusiasm with which the vast audience—­a