ound at his feet, blotting
the sparkle out of the water, while some of the small boats heeled to it
and others ran up into the wind and lay shaking. It was over in five
minutes, and the sun broke out again before the rain ceased falling; but
Gilbart decided that there was more to follow. He had not come out to
keep holiday, and an unfinished manuscript waited for him in his
lodgings--an address on True Manliness, to be delivered two evenings
hence in the Mission Room to lads under eighteen. Though he delivered
them without manuscript, Gilbart always prepared his addresses carefully
and kept the fair copies in his desk. He lived in hope of being
reported some day, and then--who could say but a book might be called
for?

His lodgings lay midway down a long, dreary street of small houses, each
with a small yard at the back, each built of brick and stuccoed, all as
like as peas, all inhabited by dockyardsmen or the families of gunners,
artificers, and petty officers in the navy. Prospect Place was its
deceptive name, and it ran parallel with three precisely similar
thoroughfares--Grafton Place, Alderney Place, and Belvedere Avenue.
These four--with a cross-street, where the Mission Room stood facing a
pawnbroker's--comprised Gilbart's field of labour.

He reached home a little after twelve, ate his dinner, and fell to work
on his manuscript. By half-past three he had finished all but the
peroration. Gilbart prided himself on his perorations; and knowing from
experience that it helped him to ideas and phrases he caught up his hat
and went out for a walk.

During that walk he did indeed catch and fix the needed sentences.
But, as it happened, he was never afterward able to recall one of them.
All he remembered was that much rain must have fallen; for the pavements
which had been dry in the morning were glistening, and the roadways
muddy and with standing puddles. On his way homeward each of these
puddles reflected the cold, pure light of the dying day, until Prospect
Place might have been a street in the New Jerusalem, paved with jasper,
beryl, and chrysoprase. So much he remembered, and also that his feet
must have taken him back to the Hoe, where the crowd was thicker and the
regatta drawing to an end--a few yachts only left to creep home under a
greenish sky, out of which the wind was fast dying. He had paused
somewhere to listen to a band: he could give no further account to
himself.

For this was what had