le, come to
show him tolerance, friendliness, gracious interest?

Lily Burton!--how emptily, how foolishly the name tinkled out of that
empty and foolish past! Yet what a power it had over him when he was
three and twenty! Of all the savage epithets which he afterwards
attached to its owner, probably she merited a few. She was a flirt, at
all events. She drew him on, played upon his emotions, found him, no
doubt, excellent fun; and at last, when he was imbecile enough to
declare himself, to talk of marriage, Lily, raising the drollest eyes,
quietly wished to know what his prospects were.

The intolerable shame of it, even now! But he laughed, mocking at his
dead self.

His mind's eye beheld the strange being a year later. Still in good
clothes, but unhealthy, and at his last half-crown; four and twenty,
travelled, and possessed of the elements of culture, he had only just
begun to realise the fact that men labour for their daily bread. Was it
the peculiar intensity of his egoism that so long blinded him to common
anxieties? Even as the last coins slipped between his fingers, he knew
only a vaguely irritable apprehension. Did he imagine the world would
beg for the honour of feeding and clothing Mr. Harvey Rolfe?

It came back to him, his first experience of hunger--so very different
a thing from appetite. He saw the miserable bedroom where he sat on a
rainy day. He smelt the pawnshop. His heart sank again under the weight
of awful solitude. Then, his illness; the letter he wrote to Amy; her
visit to him; the help she brought. But she could not persuade him to
go back with her to Greystone to face the Doctor. Her money was a loan;
he would bestir himself and find occupation. For a wonder, it was
found--the place at the Emigration Agency; and so, for a good many
years, the notable Mr. Harvey Rolfe sank into a life of obscure routine.

Again and again his sister Amy besought him to visit Greystone. Dr
Harvey was breaking up; would he not see the kind old man once more?
Yes, he assured himself that he would; but he took his time about it,
and Dr Harvey, who at threescore and ten could not be expected to wait
upon a young man's convenience, one day very quietly died. To Amy
Rolfe, who had become as a daughter to him, he left the larger part of
his possessions, an income of nine hundred a year. Not long after this,
Harvey met his sister, and was astonished to find her looking thin,
pale, spiritless. What did it mean? Why