“My dear Professor,” stammered Herbert, completely taken aback, “indeed, I cannot! I should never forgive myself for taking money that you might possibly want for all sorts of things before I had a chance of paying it back again!” “Nonsense!” replied the old man, rather sternly. “You must take it! I will have it so. I should never forgive _myself_ if I allowed your young life and precious talent to be wasted because you were in want of what I had lying idle! You can repay me some day when you can spare it.” “But what will you do in the meantime?” asked the young man rather diffidently, for he felt a delicacy about inquiring too closely into the old man’s circumstances. “My dividend falls due to-morrow,” was the reply. “There is not the smallest reason for your refusing to take this. Go home to your mother, tell her everything is decided, and take care of your voice for the next week. Shall you be at the concert next Monday? Perhaps not, if you are kept late at your work. If I do not see you there, will you come here the next day and tell me about it all?” His young friend promised this gladly; and in order to cut short his expressions of thanks, the Professor took up the lamp and lighted him downstairs, giving him a last warning against taking cold or overtiring his throat as he let him out. “He is a good boy,” he said to himself as he went back to his little room. “I am very glad I was able to do it. It is for the young ones to carry on the world. We old ones who have served our time must stand by and encourage the others.” He set about preparing his frugal supper—a small loaf and a pennyworth of milk, which he took from a cupboard in one corner of the room. He put the milk into a tiny tin saucepan, and, as of course there was no fire in the grate, he lighted a little spirit lamp, set the saucepan over the flame, and sat down to watch till it boiled. His mind was still running on Herbert Maxwell and his probable career, and from that it wandered back to his own young days. Gradually he seemed to live through the whole of his past life. He recalled the early home life in the comfortable house at Clapham; his kind Polish parents who had been driven like so many others from their own country; his childish passion for music which had caused him so often to be laughed at by his English schoolfellows, and the decision of his parents that he should adopt it as a profession. Then came those happy student days at Leipzig, with the growing consciousness of his own powers and the encouragement of his teachers and fellow students, his _début_ at the Gewandhaus, with the applause and laurel wreaths, succeeded by his first concert tour in Germany. He remembered his return home, to his parents’ joy, and his success in London as a player and teacher, with constant tours on the Continent, during one of which he met that lovely girl he afterwards wooed and won, to spend those few happy years with him till her sudden death abroad.