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You cannot think? Well, there will be a baby next autumn, what you call it?" "Michaelmas, I suppose," grunted Harwood through his pipe-smoke and subsided into indifference. "All this is most charming and interesting, Frau Stern," expostulated Dennis, "but, as our enthusiastic friend Harwood delicately hints, what we really let you go for was to locate the Missing St. Michael."

He regarded it as a species of folly. Disgust had left him. The pool of Memory would have had to be stirred to remind him of the pipe-smoke in her hair. "You are sure to please me when you see me?" he murmured. "You are very confident, young lady!" So much had her charm faded.

Slowly the low-pitched voice of the Nestor began to dominate the place, cloudy with its pipe-smoke and redolent with the stale fumes of fires long dead. Like some Hogarth picture against a sombre background the ungainly figures of men stood out of shadow and melted into it: men unkempt and tribal in their fierceness of aspect.

So, after a few midwinter weeks of brooding, lassitude, and sleepless fasting, his personal servants, there being no friend at hand to replace them, ventured to remonstrate with their master. Piotr was now as much his devoted slave as was old Sósha, who had recently retired from active duty to the kitchen-corner, where his reminiscences and his pipe-smoke together flavored that cheery room.

Sidonie would have been glad to have him leave the house in the evening for a fashionable club, a resort of wealthy, well-dressed men; but the idea of his returning, amid clouds of pipe-smoke, to his friends of earlier days, Sigismond, Delobelle, and her own father, humiliated her and made her unhappy. So he ceased to frequent the place; and that was something of a sacrifice.

I suppose they stopped there, but I am not sure. No wonder the romancer humorously added a touch that made a spider of the doctor himself, with his vast web of pipe-smoke! The great romance of "Monte Beni" is thus referred to by Mr. Motley and his wife; I give a few sentences written by the latter, a friend of many years' standing, and I insert Mr. Motley's letter entire:

These are the tea-table days. His preference was for the visage of Wilfrid Pole, which he saw not. At the aspect of the fearful mask, this young man stared, and then cursed; and then, by an odd transition, he was reminded, as by the force of a sudden gust, that Emilia's hair was redolent of pipe-smoke. His remark was, "I can't be seen in this state."

Before me, to left, across the hall, was a small room. The door was open. I smelled very vile pipe-smoke and heard footfalls overhead, but no sound of voices. I became at once hopeful that I should have to deal with but one man. I opened cautiously a window in the little room and sat down to listen and wait. I had been given a half-hour. My repeater at last struck 10:45.

A sense of not altogether maudlin pity came upon me, and I went over and sat down beside him. No one took any heed of us. The air was heavy with pipe-smoke, oaths, mad catches of song, clink of glasses, and rattle of dice noisily cast, with here and there a toast cried; so that it was hard to see for the smoke, or to hear a man speak. "Why, Savoy! How earnest thou here?" I said.

The conjunction of those two faces amid the pipe-smoke and the confusion of the crowd, produced upon Sigismond the effect of two ghosts evoked by a bad dream. He was afraid for his friend, without knowing exactly why; and suddenly it occurred to him to take him away. "Let us go, Risler. The heat here is enough to kill one."