klessness of such a slippery
subject--might have held himself released from his vows. Of course it
had been particularly in the event of a Liberal triumph that he had
threatened to make himself felt; the effect of a brand plucked from the
burning would be so much greater if the flames were already high. Yet
Nick had not kept him to the letter of this pledge, and had so fully
admitted the right of a thorough connoisseur, let alone a faithful
friend, to lose patience with him that he was now far from greeting his
visitor with a reproach. He felt much more thrown on his defence.

Gabriel, however, forbore at first to attack him. He brought in only
blandness and benevolence and a great content at having obeyed the
mystic voice--it was really a remarkable case of second sight--which had
whispered him that the recreant comrade of his prime was in town. He had
just come back from Sicily after a southern winter, according to a
custom frequent with him, and had been moved by a miraculous prescience,
unfavourable as the moment might seem, to go and ask for Nick in
Calcutta Gardens, where he had extracted from his friend's servant an
address not known to all the world. He showed Nick what a mistake it had
been to fear a dull arraignment, and how he habitually ignored all
lapses and kept up the standard only by taking a hundred fine things for
granted. He also abounded more than ever in his own sense, reminding his
relieved listener how no recollection of him, no evocation of him in
absence, could ever do him justice. You couldn't recall him without
seeming to exaggerate him, and then acknowledged, when you saw him, that
your exaggeration had fallen short. He emerged out of vagueness--his
Sicily might have been the Sicily of _A Winter's Tale_--and would
evidently be reabsorbed in it; but his presence was positive and
pervasive enough. He was duly "intense" while he lasted. His connexions
were with beauty, urbanity and conversation, as usual, but they made up
a circle you couldn't find in the Court Guide. Nick had a sense that he
knew "a lot of esthetic people," but he dealt in ideas much more than
in names and addresses. He was genial and jocose, sunburnt and
romantically allusive. It was to be gathered that he had been living for
many days in a Saracenic tower where his principal occupation was to
watch for the flushing of the west. He had retained all the serenity of
his opinions and made light, with a candour of which the only de