th here to
marry me first and tell her dad afterwards."

"I only wish I dared," sighed Kathleen. "Well, if we're going to have
our walk, we'd better be getting along. Will I meet you by the side-gate
into the Winter Garden at a quarter to one?"

"Right-o," said Michael.

"I wonder if you'd lend Mr. Trimble your bicycle?"

"Of course," said Michael.

"Because we could get out of the town a bit," suggested Kathleen. "And
that's always pleasanter."

Michael spent a dull morning in wandering about Bournemouth, while
Kathleen and her Trimble probably rode along the same road he and she
had gone a few days back. He tried to console himself with thoughts of
self-sacrifice, and he took a morbid delight in the imagination of the
pleasure he had made possible for others. But undeniably his own morning
was dreary, and not even could Swinburne's canorous Triumph of Time do
much more than echo somewhat sadly through the resonant emptiness of
his self-constructed prison, whose windows opened on to a sentimental if
circumscribed view of unattainable sweetness.

Michael sat on a bench in a sophisticated pine-grove and, having lighted
a cigarette, put out the match with his sighing exhalation of _'O love,
my love, and no love for me.'_ It was wonderful to Michael how perfectly
Swinburne expressed his despair. _'O love, my love, had you loved but
me.'_ And why had she not loved him? Why did she prefer Trimble? Did
Trimble ever read Swinburne? Could Trimble sit like this smoking calmly
a cigarette and breathing out deathless lines of love's despair? Michael
began to feel a little sorry for Kathleen, almost as sorry for her as he
felt for himself. Soon the Easter holidays would be over, and he would
go back to school. He began to wonder whether he would wear the marks of
suffering on his countenance, and whether his friends would eye him
curiously, asking themselves in whispers what man this was that came
among them with so sad and noble an expression of resignation. As
Michael thought of Trimble and Kathleen meeting in Burton-on-Trent and
daily growing nearer to each other in love, he became certain that his
grief would indeed be manifest. He pictured himself sitting in the
sunlit serene class-room of the History Sixth, a listless figure of
despair, an object of wondering, whispering compassion. And so his life
would lose itself in a monotone of discontent. Grey distances of time
presented themselves to him with a terrible menace