aid, broken off the tail of their sole and undivided parent. It goes
on living as we go on living; often, indeed, if we be poets or artists, it
survives us many years; it may be a friend, but it is oftener a foe; and
it is always a sad companion.

I sat one evening in my sumptuous library near Rutland Gate. I was deep in
my favourite author, my bank-book, when presently an entry--as a matter of
fact, a quarterly allowance to a friend (well, a woman friend) of my
youth--set me thinking. Just then my man entered. A youth wished to see
me. He would not give his name, but sent word that I knew him very well
for all that. Being in a good humour, I consented to see him. He was a
young man of about twenty, and his shabby clothes could not conceal that
he was comely. He entered the room with light step and chin in air, and to
my surprise he strode over to where I sat and seated himself without a
word. Then he looked at me with his blue eyes, and I recognised him with a
start 'What's the new book?' he asked eagerly, pointing to my open
bank-book.

Bending over he looked at it: 'Pshaw! Figures. You used not to care much
about them. When we were together it used to be Swinburne's _Poems and
Ballads_, or Shakespeare's _Sonnets_!'

As he spoke he tugged a faded copy of the _Sonnets_ from his pocket. It
slipped from his hand. As it fell it opened, and faded violets rained from
its leaves. The youth gathered them up carefully, as though they had been
valuable, and replaced them.

'How do you sell your violets?' I asked, ironically. 'I'll give you a
pound apiece for them!'

'A pound! Twenty pounds apiece wouldn't buy them,' he laughed, and I
remembered that they were the violets Alice Sunshine and I had gathered
one spring day when I was twenty. We had found them in a corner of the
dingle, where I had been reading the _Sonnets_ to her, till in our book
that day we read no more. As we parted she pressed them between the leaves
and kissed them. I remember, too, that I had been particular to write the
day and hour against them, and I remember further how it puzzled me a
couple of years after what the date could possibly mean.

Having secured his book, my visitor once more looked me straight in the
face, and as he did so he seemed to grow perplexed and disappointed. As I
gazed at him my contentment, too, seemed to be slowly melting away. Five
minutes before I had felt the most comfortable _bourgeois_ in the world.
There seemed nothin