Yet it was things undistinguished and unbeautiful in themselves that gave the best effects. Slipping through back streets to Leicester Square, the two friends were now and again brought to a complete stop. Between the great bulk of a towering house utterly blocked in with shadow and some tawdry outpost of a spreading theatre splashed with advertisement, they would see a patch of sky twisted into writhen cloud, royal, amber, impenetrable. Some Titan, striding through the heavenlies, had flung his Bacchic scarf from him. Stained with the purple of his feast, it fell across the world, an orange symbol of drunken ecstasy. Said Paul: "Manning, God gave us eyes to see that." The other's face remained immobile. It was odd to see how that splendour shone on his hair and eyes, odd, Paul thought, because his friend's face was hard, and no less hard for that caress. "Surely you must think so!" he exclaimed. "'I am all that has been and that is and that shall be, and no mortal has ever raised my veil,'" quoted Manning. Paul looked up and away. "We cannot even touch it," he said suddenly. "I've never thought of that." A suggestion of the after-glow still hung suspended in the sky as he bathed and dressed. He ran his blind up to see it as he stood in his shirt-sleeves before the glass. But even the poet in him could not be holden by such beauty to-night. The earth was too real beneath his feet. It was so wonderful that he, Paul Kestern, should be standing dressing there. Memories came and went like meteors through his mind. He remembered his first sonnet. He remembered how, for the first time, in the harsh atmosphere of a school class-room and through the, to him, uncertain medium of a Latin poet, the first glimpse of fairy lands forlorn had come to him, and the magic casement opened. A new master had found them plodding wearily through Horace and had, by an impulse, stayed the halting construe of--of--(yes, it was old Lammick; he thought he had forgotten Lammick!)--of Lammick, to render the thing himself. As he spoke, it was plain that he had forgotten the boys, and so far as Paul was concerned, he had very soon forgotten the master. Only he saw the old Roman singing woven words of music about unutterable things.