He lies in Hampstead Churchyard, as his master, Maurice, at Highgate. The line of founders has now died out, but their memorial is a living memorial—better and nobler lives of men. _THE PORTRAIT OF THE BELOVED._ The tall, young, frock-coated librarian came into the ladies’ reading-room with a noiseless, gliding step and an air of apology. He moved a library ladder against the high shelves of calf-bound volumes, ran up the ladder with a gentle swiftness, selected a tall folio from the top shelf and came down again, leaving the room by the half-glass door as unobtrusively as he had entered it. There were only two people in the reading-room. One was an elderly woman, who sat in front of a splendid fire, dozing, her head to one side. She rested her cheek in her hand. She was elderly and had a disordered, tousled look. Her hair, which had been a colourless fair, and was now an indeterminate grey, was falling loose about her ears. Yet there was a suggestion of lost beauty and grace, something evanescent, something of youth, of the wreck of loveliness, about the drooped head and the huddled figure. Outside, the streets were miserable. The flagged courtyard beneath the windows showed a dull surface of glimmering wet reflection. No hope of its clearing. The skies were muddy, and beyond the courtyard in the narrow street there passed now and again an oilskinned figure under an umbrella, or a depressed cab-horse, behind an ancient driver and disgracefully rickety vehicle—himself, poor beast, only fit for the knacker’s yard. It was comfortable in the ladies’ reading-room, where very few people came except the two who now occupied it. There was something that appealed to Esther Denison, the younger of the two ladies, in the rooms which had been undisturbed since Lord Edward Fitzgerald had moved about them, his head full of rare dreams, more than a century ago. That was the Beloved himself in the portrait above the magnificently carved mantelpiece, set amid the backs of the old volumes on their shelves, glimmering out of the soberly rich surroundings with a suggestion of eternal gaiety and tender charm. Such colour and vivacity! The brown eyes of the portrait drew Esther Denison from her books and manuscripts, in spite of herself. She was working at ‘Middle Irish’ for a University studentship. Now and again she had to tinkle the little bell for a librarian to find something she wanted. There were several librarians, but it was always the same one who answered her bell. She was hardly conscious of him while she thanked him so sweetly for finding what she wanted. She was hardly aware how painstaking he was, how anxious to help. There never was more than a murmured word between them. They observed the rule of silence of the reading-room, although there was never anyone there but Esther Denison, and that queer old Miss Brooke, who in her waking hours read nothing but eighteenth-century memoirs, with now and again a volume of poetry or a romance.