"You're a brick, sir!" His voice was a mellow contrast to the other's. "My friends, this gentleman has suggested that we pass the hat for our poor friend Klotz." "I didn't neither," protested the benefactor. "Leastways----" But the woman of the shoulders cut him short by placing two shillings beside him. It was tactful of her, a kindly thing to do, and again I was amazed. There was a womanly, motherly look about her as she turned away, and her eyes were radiant like stars in a mist. I think I gave ten bob--it must have been a considerable amount, for the girl who would have been pretty if she hadn't rouged looked straight into my eyes and said something that sounded like a blessing. I hope it was; she made me think of a little sister I once had. And then we were walking together again in the street, and the crowds were thinner than before. I cannot remember what we talked of, but I know I said to him, "Where did you learn to play like that?" And he answered, "My dear old boy, music must be loved, not learned." Then we were in Sloane Square, at my flat, and I was thanking him, or he was thanking me--I forget which; and he promised to call at noon next day to take me to Klotz's home.... And the lamps in Sloane Square seemed duller than before. Selfishness does not die in an hour, but the bachelor who looked from his window that night was a different man from the one who had spoken to Mrs. Mulvaney. He was thinking ... and much is accomplished in itself when a man is made to think. A distant clock struck one. IV I have never known any one to change so little with the cycle of years as Basil Norman. When he came to Westminster, at the age of twelve, he had an easy nonchalance, a delightful insouciance, that never left him. He went from form to form, trod the stone-flagged passages as others did; but the youth of seventeen that left Westminster bore the same smiling, detached personality as when he entered. The atmosphere of tradition interested but did not drug him; the Elizabethan pancake impressed him less than did a contemporary Edwardian soap-bubble. Conscientious form-masters recognized his extraordinary abilities, and gave him the benefit of well-worded and impressive homilies on achievement. Sometimes for effect they quoted Latin. Norman would counter with a "Greek remark." He never studied, but more than one scholar owed success to the eleventh-hour coaching of Basil Norman. Learning, like everything else, came to him as a needle to a magnet. With a curious air of detachment he watched the panorama of schoolboy life, noticing with a discerning eye the various strata upon which public-school morality is founded, assigning the relative importance of scholarship and cricket, and nodding knowingly as the process of standardization brought similarity of speech, accent, thought, and vocabulary to all his fellows. He was like a Puck who had never been really young, but who refused to become a day older.