_The Watch_. For this is the next article on the inventory, of which any substance can be written, and its history is practically known already. John’s mother had given it to him. It represented the many times those two bright eyes were tired with counting the stitches of the white lace shawls. It represented the thousands of times that those slender, sensitive fingers had rested in weariness from their ceaseless passing to and fro. It represented almost the last lace-work she had done, before those fingers had at length been held motionless in the cold grip of paralysis. But, above all, it stood for the love of that gentle heart that beat with so much pride and so much pleasure, to see the little boy, whose head her breast had fondled, come to the stern and mighty age of twenty-one. And two pounds five was the value they put upon it all. _The Little Brass Man_,--the _Chevalier d’honneur_. His story has already been told--his life, so far as it concerns this history. But of what he had lived through in the hundred years that had gone before--nobody knows. One can only assume, without fear of inaccuracy, that it was the life of a gentleman. CHAPTER XIV THE WAY TO FIND OUT These were the thoughts passing and re-passing idly through John’s mind as he sat, waiting, upon the stiff little iron chair in Kensington Gardens, and felt the minted edge of the half-crowns and the florins that lay so comfortably at the bottom of his pocket. And then came Jill. She came alone. He saw her in the distance, coming up that sudden rise of the Broad Walk down which hoops roll so splendidly--become so realistically restive, and prance and rear beneath the blow of the stick in the circus-master’s hand. And--she was walking alone. Then, in a moment, the Gardens became empty. John was not conscious of their becoming so. They were--just empty. Down a long road, tapering to the infinite point of distance, on which her figure moved alone, she might have been coming--slowly, gradually, to their ultimate meeting. He felt no wonder, realised no surprise at their sudden solitude. When in the midst of Romance, you are not conscious of the miracles it performs. You do not marvel at the wonders of its magic carpets which, in the whisk of a lamb’s tail, transport you thousands of miles away; you are not amazed at the wizardry of its coats of invisibility which can hide you two from the whole world, or hide the whole world from you. All these you take for granted; for Romance, when it does come to you, comes, just plainly and without ceremony, in the everyday garments of life and you never know the magician you have been entertaining until he is gone. Even John himself, whose business in life it was to see the romance in the life of others, could not recognise it now in his own. There were women he had met, there were women he had loved; but this was romance and he never knew it.