so I went on distastefully. Was
there no profession in this age of specialism for taking away children's
garments from houses where they were suddenly become a pain? Could I
sell them? Could I give them to the needy, who would probably dispose of
them for gin? I told him of a friend with a young child who had already
refused them because it would be unpleasant to him to be reminded of
Timothy, and I think this was what touched him to the quick, so that he
made the offer I was waiting for.

I had done it with a heavy foot, and by this time was in a rage with
both him and myself, but I always was a bungler, and, having adopted
this means in a hurry, I could at the time see no other easy way out.
Timothy's hold on life, as you may have apprehended, was ever of the
slightest, and I suppose I always knew that he must soon revert to the
obscure. He could never have penetrated into the open. It was no life
for a boy.

Yet now, that his time had come, I was loath to see him go. I seem
to remember carrying him that evening to the window with uncommon
tenderness (following the setting sun that was to take him away), and
telling him with not unnatural bitterness that he had got to leave me
because another child was in need of all his pretty things; and as the
sun, his true father, lapt him in its dancing arms, he sent his love to
a lady of long ago whom he called by the sweetest of names, not knowing
in his innocence that the little white birds are the birds that never
have a mother. I wished (so had the phantasy of Timothy taken possession
of me) that before he went he could have played once in the Kensington
Gardens, and have ridden on the fallen trees, calling gloriously to me
to look; that he could have sailed one paper-galleon on the Round Pond;
fain would I have had him chase one hoop a little way down the laughing
avenues of childhood, where memory tells us we run but once, on a long
summer-day, emerging at the other end as men and women with all the fun
to pay for; and I think (thus fancy wantons with me in these desolate
chambers) he knew my longings, and said with a boy-like flush that the
reason he never did these things was not that he was afraid, for he
would have loved to do them all, but because he was not quite like other
boys; and, so saying, he let go my finger and faded from before my eyes
into another and golden ether; but I shall ever hold that had he been
quite like other boys there would have been none brav