Yet I to whom your frail caprice Turns for the moment ardent eyes Have seen the strength of love release Your sleeping memories. I too am servant to your glance, I too am bent beneath your sway, My wonder! My desire! who dance Men’s heads and hearts away. Sweet arbitress of love and death, Unchanging on time’s changing sands, You hold more lightly than a breath The world between your hands! Second Thoughts By Arthur Moore I AS the clock struck eight Sir Geoffrey Vincent cast aside the dull society journal with which he had been beguiling the solitude of his after-dinner coffee and cigar, and abandoned, with an alacrity eloquent of long boredom, his possession of one of the capacious chairs which invited repose in the dingy smoking-room of an old-fashioned club. It had been reserved for him, after twenty monotonous years of almost unbroken exile, spent, for the most part, amid the jungles and swamps of Lower Burma, to realise that a friendless man, alone in the most populous city of the world, may encounter among thousands of his peers a desolation more supreme than the solitude of the most ultimate wilderness; and he found himself wondering, a little savagely, why, after all, he had expected his home-coming to be so different from the reality that now confronted him. When he landed at Brindisi, a short ten days ago, misgivings had already assailed him vaguely; the fact that he was practically homeless, that, although not altogether bereft of kith and kin, he had no family circle to welcome him as an addition to its circumference, had made it inevitable that his rapid passage across the Continent should be haunted by forebodings to which he had not cared to assign a shape too definite; phantoms which he exorcised hopefully, with a tacit reliance on a trick of falling on his feet which had seldom failed his need. He consoled himself with the thought that London was home, England was home; he would meet old comrades in the streets perhaps, assuredly at his club, and such encounters would be so much the more delightful if they were fortuitous, unexpected. The plans which he had laid so carefully pacing the long deck of the P. and O. boat in the starlight, or, more remotely, lying awake through the hot night hours under a whining punkah in his lonely bungalow, had all implied, however vaguely and impersonally, a certain companionship. He was dimly conscious that he had cousins somewhere in the background; he had long since lost touch with them, but he would look them up. He had two nieces, still in their teens, the children of his only sister who had died ten years ago; he had never seen them, but their photographs were charming--they should be overwhelmed with such benefactions as a bachelor uncle with a well-lined purse may pleasantly bestow. His friends--the dim legion that was to rise about his path--should take