that all the little,
comfortable details of that little, comfortable bachelor life of ours
were over and done, the rooms into which we had fitted so snugly,
rented, perhaps, at that moment, the table at the club no longer ours
by every precedent, the vacations no more to be planned together and
enjoyed together.

The ship drew out into the harbour and I leaned hard on my stick and
wondered drearily how long I was likely to live. Oh, I admit the
shamefulness of my unmanly state! I might have been drying the
orphan's tear or making Morris chairs or purifying local politics, but
I wasn't.

Tip Elder walked over to me and put his hand on my shoulder.

"Well, _that_ baby's face is washed!" he said cheerily, "as my mother
puts it. And I hope it's going to turn out all right. But I don't
believe you or I would be in Roger's shoes for a good deal, would we?"

I turned on him fiercely.

"Speak for yourself, Elder!" I cried. "I'd give most of this life that
I know about and all of the next that you don't, to be for a little
while in Roger's shoes! Understand that!"

And brushing by him and utterly neglecting Sue and the Wolcott
Searses, I jumped into a waiting cab and hurried away from that
departing vessel, with two-thirds of what I loved in the world on her
deck.

I took one last look at our old rooms, bare and clean, now, for my
things were sold and Roger's stored; I gave all my clothes to the
house valet, to his intense gratitude, and when, with a nervous blow
of my favourite cane--a gift from Roger--in an effort to beat the pile
of cloth on the floor into symmetrical shape, the stick broke in the
middle, I came as near to an hysterical laugh as I ever came in my
life.

"Take all the other sticks, Hodgson," I said huskily, "and the
racquets, if you want them. And give the rod to the night
porter--Richard fishes, I know. And take the underwear, too--yes, all
of it!"

"And the trunk, sir? Where would you wish----"

"O Lord, take the trunk!" I burst out, for the familiar labels, ay,
the very dints in the brass lock, carried only sour memories to me,
now.

"But, sir, you've only what you stand in!" the man cried, convinced, I
am certain, that I contemplated suicide. "I've got the day to get
through, Hodgson," I reassured him, "and the shops will be of great
assistance!"

I left him gloating over his windfall, and plunged into haberdashery.

Fortunately for my nervous loathing of all my old possessions, I had