Calabressa sat silent.  When some one began to play the zither, he was thinking not of the Culturverein in London, but of the dark pine woods above the Erlau, and of the house there, and of Natalie Berezolyi as she played in the evening.  He would ask Natalushka if she, too, played the zither.

CHAPTER XX.

FIDELIO.

George Brand walked away from the house in Curzon Street in a sort of bewilderment of hope and happiness and gratitude.  He would even try to accept Calabressa’s well-meant counsel:  why should he not be friends with everybody?  The world had grown very beautiful; there was to be no more quarrelling in it, or envy, or malice.

In the dark he almost ran against a ragged little child who was selling flowers.

“Will you buy a rose-bud, sir?” said she.

“What?” he said, severely, “selling flowers at this time of night?  Get away home with you and get your supper, and go to bed;” but he spoiled the effect of his sharp admonition by giving the girl all the silver he had in his pocket.

He found the little dinner-party in a most loquacious mood.  O’Halloran in especial was in full swing.  The internal economy of England was to be readjusted.  The capital must be transferred to the centre of the real wealth and brain-power of the country—­that is to say, somewhere about Leeds or Manchester.  This proposition greatly pleased Humphreys, the man from the North, who was quite willing to let the Royal Academy, the South Kensington and National Galleries, and the British Museum remain in London, so long as the seat of government was transferred to Huddersfield or thereabouts.  But O’Halloran drew such a harrowing picture of the effect produced on the South of England intellect by its notorious and intense devotion to the arts, that Humphreys was almost convicted of cruelty.

However, if these graceless people thought to humbug the hard-headed man from the North, he succeeded on one occasion in completely silencing his chief enemy, O’Halloran.  That lover of paradox and idle speculation was tracing the decline of superstition to the introduction of the use of steam, and was showing how, wherever railways went in India, ghosts disappeared; whereupon the Darlington man calmly retorted that, as far as he could see, the railways in this country were engaged in making as many ghosts as they could possibly disperse in India.  This flank attack completely surprised and silenced the light skirmisher, who sought safety in lighting another cigar.

More serious matters, however, were also talked about, and Humphreys was eager that Brand should go down to Wolverhampton with him next morning.  Brand pleaded but for one day’s delay.  Humphreys reminded him that certain members of the Political Committee of the Trades-union Congress would be at Wolverhampton, and that he had promised to see them.  After that, silence.