"It is very nice and very thoughtful of you, Dollops," he said presently, his voice a little thick, his tones a little uneven. "But don't be silly and waste your money, my lad. Lay it by. You may need it one day. Now toddle on and get things ready for our outing." But afterwards--when the boy had gone and he was alone in the room--he walked back to the potted rose bush and touched its buds lovingly, and stood leaning over it and saying nothing for a long time. And though the necktie that hung on its branches was a harlequin thing of red and green and violent purple, when he came to dress for that promised outing he put it on and adjusted it as tenderly, wore it as proudly as ever knight of old wore the colours of his lady. "You look a fair treat in it, sir," said Dollops, delightedly and admiringly, when he came in later and saw that he had it on. And if anything had been wanting to make him quite, quite happy, it was wanting no more. Or, if it had been, the night that came down and found them housed in a little old-world inn, with a shining river at its door and the hush and the odorous darkness of the country lanes about it, must of itself have supplied the omission; for when all the house was still and all the lights were out, he crept from his bed and curled up like a dog on the mat before Cleek's door, and would not have changed places with an emperor. They were up and on the river, master and man, almost as soon as the dawn itself; taking their morning plunge under a sky that was but just changing the tints of rose to those of saffron before they merged into the actual light of day; and to the boy the man seemed almost a god in that dim light, which showed but an ivory shoulder lifting now and again as he struck outwards and deft his way through a yielding, yellow-grey waste that leaped in little lilac-hued ripples to his chin, and thence wavered off behind him in dancing lines of light. And once, when he heard him lift up his voice and sing as he swam, he felt sure that he _must_ be a god--that that alone could explain why he had found him so different from other men, and cared for him as he had never cared for any human thing before.