have plenty of money--'tisn't that. I haven't told you that a
friend of mine, a lady, has left me nearly five thousand a year. I
don't think you ever saw her--Lady Seeley."

John burst into uncontrollable laughter. "That is the best thing I
ever heard in all my life. I don't think I ever heard anything that
amused me more. The grotesqueness of the whole thing." Seeing that
Mike was annoyed he hastened to explain his mirth. "The
inexplicableness of human action always amuses me; the inexplicable
is romance, at least that is the only way I can understand romance.
When you reduce life to a logical sequence you destroy all poetry,
and, I think, all reality. We do things constantly, and no one can
say why we do them. Frederick the Great coming in, after reviewing
his troops, to play the flute, that to me is intensely romantic. A
lady, whom you probably treated exceedingly badly, leaving you her
property, that too is, to me."

Admonished by his conscience, John's hilarity clouded into a sort of
semi-humorous gravity, and he advised Mike on the necessity of
reforming his life.

"I am very sorry, for there is no one whose society is as attractive
to me as yours; there is no one in whom I find so many of my ideas,
and yet there is no one from whom I am so widely separated; at times
you are sublime, and then you turn round and roll in the nastiest
dirt you can find."

Mike loved a lecture from John, and he exerted himself to talk.

Looking at each other in admiration, they regretted the other's
weaknesses. Mike deplored John's conscience, which had forced him to
burn his poems; John deplored Mike's unsteady mind, which veered and
yielded to every passion. And in the hall they talked of the great
musician and the great king, or John played the beautiful hymns of
the Russian Church, in whose pathetic charm he declared Chopin had
found his inspiration; they spoke of the _Grail_ and the _Romance of
the Swan_, or, wandering into the library, they read aloud the
ever-flowering eloquence of De Quincey, the marmoreal loveliness of
Landor, the nurselike tenderness of Tennyson.

Through all these aestheticisms Lily Young shone, her light waxing to
fulness day by day. Mike had written to Frank, beseeching him to
forward any letters that might arrive. He expected an answer from
Lily within the week, and not until its close did he begin to grow
fearful. Then rapidly his fear increased and unable to bear with so
much desire in the pre