ts or duets on the grass of the Green Park,
of behaving like the lilies of the field. . . . Francis found he was
rather late, and proceeded hastily to his mother's house in Savile
Row to array himself, if not "like one of these," like an exceedingly
well-dressed young man, who demanded of his tailor the utmost of his
art; with the prospect, owing to Michael's generosity, of being paid
to-morrow.

Michael, when his cousin had left him, did not at once proceed to his
evening by himself with his piano, though an hour before he had longed
to be alone with it and a pianoforte arrangement of the Meistersingers,
of which he had promised himself a complete perusal that evening.
But Francis's visit had already distracted him, and he found now
that Francis's departure took him even farther away from his designed
evening. Francis, with his good looks and his gay spirits, his easy
friendships and perfect content (except when a small matter of deficit
and dunning letters obscured the sunlight for a moment), was exactly all
that he would have wished to be himself. But the moment he formulated
that wish in his mind, he knew that he would not voluntarily have parted
with one atom of his own individuality in order to be Francis or anybody
else. He was aware how easy and pleasant life would become if he could
look on it with Francis's eyes, and if the world would look on him as it
looked on his cousin. There would be no more bother. . . . In a
moment, he would, by this exchange, have parted with his own unhappy
temperament, his own deplorable body, and have stepped into an amiable
and prosperous little neutral kingdom that had no desires and no
regrets. He would have been free from all wants, except such as could
be gratified so easily by a little work and a great capacity for being
amused; he would have found himself excellently fitting the niche into
which the rulers of birth and death had placed him: an eldest son of
a great territorial magnate, who had what was called a stake in the
country, and desired nothing better.

Willingly, as he had said, would he have changed circumstances with
Francis, but he knew that he would not, for any bait the world could
draw in front of him, have changed natures with him, even when, to
all appearance, the gain would so vastly have been on his side. It was
better to want and to miss than to be content. Even at this moment,
when Francis had taken the sunshine out of the room with his departure,
Mi