It was so like the old days when these two used to be companions! Many and many a time had the younger man come down to these lodgings, with all his troubles and wild impulses and pangs of contrition ready to be revealed; and then Ingram, concealing the liking he had for the lad's generous waywardness, his brilliant and facile cleverness and his dashes of honest self-depreciation, would gravely lecture him and put him right and send him off comforted. Frank Lavender had changed much since then. The handsome boy had grown into a man of the world; there was less self-revelation in his manner, and he was less sensitive to the opinions and criticisms of his old friend; but Ingram, who was not prone to idealism of any sort, had never ceased to believe that this change was but superficial, and that, in different circumstances and with different aims, Lavender might still fulfill the best promise of his youth. "You have been a good friend to me, Ingram," he said with a hot blush, "and I have treated you as badly as I have treated--By Jove! what a chance I had at one time!" He was looking back on all the fair pictures his imagination had drawn while yet Sheila and he were wandering about that island in the northern seas. "You had," said Ingram decisively. "At one time I thought you the most fortunate man in the world. There was nothing left for you to desire, so far as I could see. You were young and strong, with plenty of good spirits and sufficient ability to earn yourself an honorable living, and you had won the love of the most beautiful and best-hearted woman I have known. You never seemed to me to know what that meant. Men marry women--there is no difficulty about that--and you can generally get an amiable sort of person to become your wife and have a sort of affection for you, and so on. But how many have bestowed on them the pure and exalted passion of a young and innocent girl, who is ready to worship with all the fervor of a warmly imaginative and emotional nature the man she has chosen to love? And suppose he is young too, and capable of understanding all the tender sentiments of a high-spirited, sensitive and loyal woman, and suppose that he fancies himself as much in love with her as she with him? These conditions are not often fulfilled, I can tell you. It is a happy fluke when they are. Many a day ago I told you that you should consider yourself more fortunate than if you had been made an emperor; and indeed it seemed to me that you had everything in the shape of worldly happiness easily within your reach. How you came to kick away the ball from your feet--Well, God only knows. The thing is inconceivable to me. You are sitting here as you used to sit two or three years ago, and in the interval you have had every chance in life; and now if you are not the most wretched man in London, you ought at least to be the most ashamed and repentant." Lavender's head was buried in his hands: he did not speak.