Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/180

162 absinthe or chloral or whatever it is? Now, give it up, there's a dear old chap. Look here," he added, laying a kind hand upon the other's shoulder, "get shaved and into some decent clothes, and come along to my chambers. I'll put you up for to-night, and to-morrow we'll run down to a little place I know on the coast: a week of it will make a new man of you."

The poet started up, a prodigy of wrath.

"Ass!" he exclaimed. "It is life and death, I tell you. You call yourself a friend; will you do this nothing for me? I ask you for the last time."

"No." The answer was given in a tone of quiet obstinacy which, seldom heard by Freddy's intimates, never failed to carry conviction. "I will go no such fool's errand," he added, "for any man. And now I must be off. Good-bye. I'll look round again in a day or two, and I hope I shall find a rational creature."

For a moment, while he held the handle, he faltered; the spectacle might have moved commiseration; but hardening his heart—

"It's too damned silly," he muttered, as he descended the steep stairs.

The poet heard him give a direction to the driver and presently the clatter of hoofs, as the hansom turned and tinkled away southwards.

Quarter after quarter chimed from the church of St. Pancras, and the solitary still sat crouching over the table. Involuntarily from the bitterness of present despair his mind strayed back into the past, and by an almost orderly survey reviewed the tissue of its web; picking out from it the gilded strands that here and there diversified the dun the day when the long-sought publisher was found, the first handling of the precious volume, the article

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