l do no good by
punishing yourself in small matters, for your trouble is likely to be
serious enough, I can tell you, before you get Sheila back, if ever you
get her back. Take the chair with the cushion."

It was so like the old days when these two used to be companions! Many
and many a time had the younger man come down to these lodgings, with
all his troubles and wild impulses and pangs of contrition ready to be
revealed; and then Ingram, concealing the liking he had for the lad's
generous waywardness, his brilliant and facile cleverness and his dashes
of honest self-depreciation, would gravely lecture him and put him right
and send him off comforted. Frank Lavender had changed much since then.
The handsome boy had grown into a man of the world; there was less
self-revelation in his manner, and he was less sensitive to the opinions
and criticisms of his old friend; but Ingram, who was not prone to
idealism of any sort, had never ceased to believe that this change was
but superficial, and that, in different circumstances and with different
aims, Lavender might still fulfill the best promise of his youth.

"You have been a good friend to me, Ingram," he said with a hot blush,
"and I have treated you as badly as I have treated--By Jove! what a
chance I had at one time!"

He was looking back on all the fair pictures his imagination had drawn
while yet Sheila and he were wandering about that island in the
northern seas.

"You had," said Ingram decisively. "At one time I thought you the most
fortunate man in the world. There was nothing left for you to desire, so
far as I could see. You were young and strong, with plenty of good
spirits and sufficient ability to earn yourself an honorable living, and
you had won the love of the most beautiful and best-hearted woman I have
known. You never seemed to me to know what that meant. Men marry
women--there is no difficulty about that--and you can generally get an
amiable sort of person to become your wife and have a sort of affection
for you, and so on. But how many have bestowed on them the pure and
exalted passion of a young and innocent girl, who is ready to worship
with all the fervor of a warmly imaginative and emotional nature the man
she has chosen to love? And suppose he is young too, and capable of
understanding all the tender sentiments of a high-spirited, sensitive
and loyal woman, and suppose that he fancies himself as much in love
with her as she with him? These c