in, not because he was there in Nature, but because he was needed for the picture? For me, at any rate, he had the effect of making all the rest more convincing, and, while he appeared to be purely fantastic, of corresponding to some esoteric reality. Or was the apparition at the railway station also only a vision, in that case the vision of a vision? To Owen such a question was of no interest whatever, and it was Owen’s questions that we principally discussed. Very often I walked home with him and hung swinging on the iron gate while we finished an argument. At such moments he exhibited an exhilarating eagerness, and he was never anxious to get the better of me in merely verbal dispute, as I frequently was of him. It was the thing in itself he saw, and he went at it like a terrier at a rabbit-hole, sending up showers of sand into the air, but never getting to the bottom. Sometimes, when we were talking, he would catch me by my arms and swing me slowly back and forward. Sometimes he would draw me close up to him till my face almost touched his, and his eyes seemed to look straight into my spirit, and then he would suddenly release me. He had a very quick and passionate temper, and was ridiculously sensitive, so that, though I employed infinitely more tact with him than I had ever done with anybody else, I occasionally offended him. Then he would leave me, his face as red as a turkey-cock, and his grey eyes dark and bright. Possibly for the rest of that day he would ignore me utterly; indeed, the first time it happened, I was sure we had quarrelled for ever. But the next morning he came up to me with a shy and shamefaced smile, saying he was sorry. At such times there would come into his voice so charming a gentleness that it was impossible to remain angry with him. * * * * * “Will you come to the opera to-night?” he asked me one morning, looking up from an old, ink-stained Virgil. We were sitting in the window-seat, where we always sat together, and which just held two. As Dr. Gwynn, the head Classical-master, was very old, very blind, and rather deaf, it was possible to pass the time quite pleasantly in this retreat. I had not yet been inside a theatre, and Owen had been but seldom. “What is on?” I asked. “‘Faust.’” “‘Faust’? All right.” “I’ll meet you outside the theatre at a quarter to seven.” “Very well; I’ll be there.” I went home straight from school, in order to get my work done for the next day, but when I pushed open the door I became conscious that an altercation between Aunt Margaret and Miss Izzy was in progress in the other shop. They were so busy that they did not even hear me enter, though the shop-bell had rung, and, as I lingered on the threshold, I gathered that the dispute was about a young man, and I guessed who he was. I had seen him; his name was Moore; he travelled in the stationery line, and he admired Miss Izzy.