“You see,” he began, paused, and began again—“You see, if I were alone it would be one thing. But I’m not—not at all alone,” he added, evidently gaining confidence. “Ah!” exclaimed the old lawyer, a sudden gleam of new intelligence shining in his dull, weary old eyes. “And how am I to get married, Mr. Maskelyne?” “The lady does not approve of your—poetic aspirations?” “Not approve!” cried the young fellow, eagerly; “she has made me promise that I will give nothing up, that I will refuse all Mr. Bevington has arranged for me. You can’t tell how inspiring our misery is. And our courage,—a young Froissart must be our chronicler, sir. We take our sorrows gladly.” “And may I ask——” “Anything, anything,” interrupted the young man, gayly. “I’m sent here to be talked out of what they may call my folly. You see I can’t be talked out of it. Don’t that prove that it is no folly?” “You seem,” said Maskelyne, dryly, “to have settled it between you—you and she.” “Settled it! We did not need help about that. It’s the unsettling. There comes a time when friends are the worst enemies. You know that, Mr. Maskelyne?” The old lawyer paused. “Indeed I do,” he said at last, and the sneer stealing over the outlines of his face slunk away before the look of regret that came swiftly on. Almost in embarrassment, with nervous hand, he shuffled the papers on his table. Far back in the past, when his eyes were not yet dimmed by the dust blown from law-books, nor his ears deadened by the stridulent clamor of litigation, before his life had gone in attempts at “Mastering the lawless science of our law,” or he had lost himself in “That codeless myriad of precedent, That wilderness of single instances;” when he, too, dwelt in that other-world of the young, forgotten by everyone but himself, but, although hardly ever remembered, never forgotten by him—not one grain of its golden sand, not one drop of its honey-dew, not one tremor of its slightest thrill—then even he had had his romance. The freshness of the early spring morning, the airy brightness of his young visitor, himself no bad exponent of the day, the awe-footed shadow which, with almost unrecognized obtrusion, skirts the border where the ripened grain fills the field of life and nods to the ready sickle—was it something of such kind, or was it the simple story of which he had had such telling intimation, that brought it all up in memory’s half-tender glow? He, too, had once been in love. He, too, had written verses to his inamorata. He remembered it all now, with a smile of mingled pity and contempt. It needed no ransacking of the brain now to quicken into full view his own “It might have been”—to people once more the mystic world whose first paradise is rich in the slight garniture of glances and sighs and smiles and tears. Lost in himself, the old man forgot his visitor. “You are very young,” he said at last, absently. “Twenty-three,” was the answer.