your friend, the photographic man, get on?'

'Not at all badly. Did I tell you I had put money into it? I go there a
good deal, and pretend to do something.'

'Why pretend? Couldn't you find a regular job there for a few hours
every day?'

'I dare say I could. It'll be easier to get backwards and forwards from
Gunnersbury. How would you like,' he added, with a laugh, 'to live at
Gunnersbury?'

'What does it matter where one lives? I have something of a prejudice
against Hoxton or Bermondsey; but I think I could get along in most
other places. Gunnersbury is rather pleasant, I thought. Isn't it quite
near to Kew and Richmond?'

'Do those names attract you?'

'They have a certain charm for the rustic ear.'

'It's all one to me. Hughie will go to school, and make friends with
other children. You see, he's had no chance of it yet. We know a
hundred people or so, but have no intimates. Is there such a thing as
intimacy of families in London? I'm inclined to think not. Here, you go
into each other's houses without fuss and sham; you know each other,
and trust each other. In London there's no such comfort, at all events
for educated people. If you have a friend, he lives miles away; before
his children and yours can meet, they must travel for an hour and a
half by bus and underground.'

'I suppose it _must_ be London?' interrupted Morton.

'I'm afraid so,' Harvey replied absently, and his friend said no more.

He had meant this visit to be of three days at most; but time slipped
by so pleasantly that a week was gone before he could resolve on
departure. Most of the mornings he spent in rambles alone,
rediscovering many a spot in the country round which had been familiar
to him as a boy, but which he had never cared to seek in his
revisitings of Greystone hitherto. One day, as he followed the windings
of a sluggish stream, he saw flowers of arrowhead, white flowers with
crimson centre, floating by the bank, and remembered that he had once
plucked them here when on a walk with his father, who held him the
while, lest he should stretch too far and fall in. To reach them now,
he lay down upon the grassy brink; and in that moment there returned to
him, with exquisite vividness, the mind, the senses, of childhood; once
more he knew the child's pleasure in contact with earth, and his hand
grasped hard at the sweet-smelling turf as though to keep hold upon the
past thus fleetingly recovered. It was gone--no doubt, for eve