He had lived for himself alone, and had sinned for his own pleasure; and if his life within the last decade had been comparatively pure and harmless, it was because the bitter apples of the Dead Sea could tempt him no longer by their outward beauty. He was unutterably weary of the inner bitterness, and even the outward beauty had lost its charm. If he had ceased to be a sinner, it was that he was tired of sinning, rather than that he lamented his past offences. A sudden fancy, engendered out of the very emptiness and weariness of his brain, had brought him to England, and the same fancy brought him to Greenlands. He wanted to see the old, abandoned place, which had echoed with his childish laughter in the days when he could still be amused; the woods that had been peopled by his dreams, in the days when he had not yet lost the power to dream. He wanted to see these things; and, more than these things, he wanted to see the one friend whose society was pleasant, whose friendship was in some wise precious to him. “I have rather gloried in outraging the prejudices of my fellow-men,” he had said to himself sometimes, when anatomizing his own character, in that critical and meditative mood which was habitual to him; “but I believe I should scarcely like Theodore de Bergerac to think ill of me. It is not in me to play the hypocrite, and yet I fancy I have always contrived to keep the darker side of my nature hidden from him.” The master of Greenlands happened to be in an unusually reflective mood, and his reflections of to-day were tinged with a certain despondency. This nineteenth of December was his birthday, the fifty-second anniversary of his first appearance upon the stage of life; and the reflections which the day brought with it were far from pleasant. For the first time in his existence Mr. Jerningham had this morning been struck by the notion that it was a dreary thing to eat a solitary breakfast on the anniversary of his birth, uncheered by the voice of kinsman or friend invoking blessings on his head. The luxurious little dining-room in Park Lane glowed in the ruddy fire-light, and glittered with all the chaste splendour of Mr. Jerningham’s art-treasures, as he trifled with his tea and toast, far too tired of all the delicacies of this earth to care for the bloated livers of Strasbourg geese or the savoury flesh of Bayonne pigs. The room in which he had breakfasted, and the table that had been spread for him, formed a picture which a painter of still-life might have dreamed of; but it had seemed very blank and dismal to Harold Jerningham on this particular occasion, when an accidental glance at the date of his _Times_ reminded him that his fifty-second year had come to an end. He resolved forthwith upon a visit to the only friend whose sincerity he believed in, and the only living creature from whose lips good wishes would seem other than a conventionality.