And thus it was that Lionel, when he was leaving the theatre that night, found a neatly folded little note awaiting him.  He was in a considerable hurry; for he had to go home and dress and get off to a crush in Grosvenor Square, where he hoped to find Lady Adela Cunyngham, her sisters, and Miss Georgie Lestrange (there was some talk of an immediate presentation of the little pastoral comedy), so that he had only time to glance over Nina’s nervously pencilled scrawl.  Thus it ran: 

“Leo, it is magnificent, it is splendid, you are a true artist; to-morrow I write to Pandiani, he will be overjoyed as I am.  But Miss Burgoyne—­no, no, no—­she is not artist at all—­she is negligent of her part, of the others in the scene—­she puts up her fan and talks to you from behind it—­why you allow that?—­it is insult to the public!  She believes not her part and makes all the rest false.  What a shame to you, Leo; but your splendid voice, your fine timbre, carries everything!  Bravo, my Leo!  It is a great trionf, brilliant, beautiful, and Nina is proud of her friend.  Good-night from

“NINA.”

As Lionel was spinning along Piccadilly in his swift hansom, it occurred to him that if Nina were going to join the “Squire’s Daughter” company, it might be just as well for her not to have any preconceived antipathy against Miss Burgoyne.  For Miss Burgoyne was an important person at the New Theatre.

CHAPTER IV.

COUNTRY AND TOWN.

On this Sunday morning, when all the good people had gone to church, there was no sign of life on these far-stretching Winstead Downs.  The yellow roads intersecting the undulations of black-and-golden gorse were undisturbed by even a solitary tramp; so that Lionel Moore and his friend Mangan, as they idly walked along, seemed to be the sole possessors of the spacious landscape.  It was a beautiful morning, warm and clear and sunny; a southerly breeze stirred the adjacent elms into a noise as of the sea, caused the chestnuts to wave their great branches bearing thousands of milky minarets, and sent waves of shadows across the silken gray-green of a field of rye.  There was a windmill on a distant height, its long arms motionless.  A strip of Scotch firs stood black and near at one portion of the horizon; but elsewhere the successive lines of wood and hill faded away into the south, becoming of a paler and paler hue until they disappeared in a silvery mist.  The air was sweet with the resinous scent of the furze.  In short, it was a perfect day in early June, on a wide, untenanted, high-lying Surrey common.

And Maurice Mangan, in his aimless, desultory fashion, was inveighing against the vanity of the life led by certain classes in the great Babylon out of which he had just haled his rather unwilling friend; and describing their mad and frantic efforts to wrest themselves free of the demon ennui; and their ceaseless, eager clamor for hurry and excitement, lest, in some unguarded moment of silence, their souls should speak.