“It is not realistic,” said she, “it is real.  It may be an unhealthy excitement, but if we are to have it, it is the most perfect of its kind.”

“It is very horrible,” said Miss Skeat; and they drove away.

Margaret would not stay to see the great man after the curtain fell.  The disillusion of such a meeting is too great to be pleasurable.  Othello is dead, and the idea of meeting Othello in the flesh ten minutes later, smiling and triumphant, is a death-blow to that very reality which Margaret so much enjoyed.  Besides, she wanted to be alone with her own thoughts, which were not entirely confined to the stage, that night.  Writing to Claudius had brought him vividly into her life again, and she had caught herself more than once during the evening wondering how her fair Northern lover would have acted in Othello’s place.  Whether, when the furious general takes Iago by the throat in his wrath, the Swede’s grip would have relaxed so easily on one who should dare to whisper a breath against the Countess Margaret.  She so lived in the thought for a moment that her whole face glowed in the shade of the box, and her dark eyes shot out fire.  Ah me!  Margaret, will he come back to stand by your side and face the world for you?  Who knows.  Men are deceivers ever, says the old song.

Home through the long streets, lighted with the pale electric flame that gives so deathly a tinge to everything that comes within the circling of its discolour; home to her rooms with the pleasant little fire smouldering on the hearth, and flowers—­Barker’s flowers—­scenting the room; home to the cares of Clementine, to lean back with half-closed eyes, thinking, while the deft French fingers uncoil and smooth and coil again the jet-black tresses; home to the luxury of sleep unbroken by ill ease of body, though visited by the dreams of a far-away lover—­dreams not always hopeful, but ever sweet; home to a hotel!  Can a hostelry be dignified with that great name?  Yes.  Wherever we are at rest and at peace, wherever the thought of love or dream of lover visits us, wherever we look forward to meeting that lover again—­that is home.  For since the cold steel-tipped fingers of science have crushed space into a nut-shell, and since the deep-mouthed capacious present has swallowed time out of sight, there is no landmark left but love, no hour but the hour of loving, no home but where our lover is.

The little god who has survived ages of sword-play and centuries of peace-time, survives also science the leveller, and death the destroyer.

And in the night, when all are asleep, and the chimes are muffled with the thick darkness, and the wings of the dream-spirits caress the air, then the little Red Mouse comes out and meditates on all these things, and wonders how it is that men can think there is any originality in their lives or persons or doings.  The body may have changed a little, men may have grown stronger and fairer, as some say, or weaker and more puny, as others would have it, but the soul of man is even as it was from the beginning.