Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/210

 and red-and-white hat ribbon of the well-known school, which, though it has long changed hands, still retains these distinguishing marks. He passed by with a smile to visit other haunts, and it is improbable that any one noticed him. He is a small man, as he had been a small boy, and it must he confessed that his neckties are not as piquant as they should be, and that he has no right feeling on the question of boots. An insignificant figure perhaps, but a face with a loveliness of its own, insensibly bringing back some far, faint, fair sensation, as the clear singing of birds at dawn in the stunted trees which border the silent streets of a great city.

It is impossible to trace the causes which have given him, without any very obvious genius on his part, the position he holds in the world of to-day; where his friends sometimes realise that he is more to them than they can ever be to him.

He possesses one of those old-world houses in James Street, Buckingham Gate, which look over the end of Wellington Barracks Square towards the Mall and the Green Park. It was late in an afternoon towards the end of July, and there were several people in the little drawing-rooms with their modelled plaster ceilings. A very young girl in a crisp muslin dress stood at a window in the front room, looking down on a number of Guardsmen playing cricket beyond the tall iron railings and the row of dusty plane-trees. There was an undulation of bonnets and low-pitched voices behind her, and at a piano in the inner-most room, which was much darker, and where conversation had stilled, there sat a young man, reciting with unrivalled art: Dear as remember'd kisses after death, And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd On lips that are for others; deep as love, Deep as first love, and wild with all regret; O death in life, the days that are no more " and,