Page:What will he do with it.djvu/524

514 me two or three invitations to dinner, which my frequent absence from town would not allow me to accept. I ought to call on him; and, as I feel ashamed not to have done so before, I wish you would accompany me to his house. One happy word from you would save me a relapse into stutter. When I want to apologize, I always stutter."

"Darrell has left town," said the Colonel, roughly; "you have missed an opportunity that will never occur again. The most charming companion; an intellect so manly, yet so sweet! I shall never find such another." And for the first time in thirty years a tear stole to Alban Morley's eye.

. "When did he leave town?"

. "Three days ago."

. "Three days ago! and for the Continent again."

. "No, for the Hermitage. George, I have such a letter from him! You know how many years he has been absent from the world. When, this year, he reappeared, he and I grew more intimate than we had ever been since we had left school; for though the same capital held us before, he was then too occupied for much familiarity with an idle man like me. But just when I was intertwining what is left of my life with the bright threads of his, he snaps the web asunder; he quits this London world again; says he will return to it no more."

. "Yet I did hear that he proposed to renew his parliamentary career; nay, that he was about to form a second marriage with Honoria Vipont!"

. "Mere gossip—not true. No, he will never again marry. Three days ago I thought it certain that he would—certain that I should find for my old age a nook in his home—the easiest chair in his social circle; that my daily newspaper would have a fresh interest in the praise of his name or the report of his speech; that I should walk proudly into White's, sure to hear there of Guy Darrell; that I should keep from misanthropical rust my dry knowledge of life, planning shrewd panegyrics to him of a young, happy wife, needing all his indulgence—panegyrics to her of the high-minded, sensitive man, claiming tender respect and delicate soothing; that thus, day by day, I should have made more pleasant the home in which I should have planted myself, and found in his children boys to lecture and girls to spoil. Don't be jealous, George. I like your wife, I love your little ones, and you will have all I have to leave. But to an old bachelor, who would keep young to the last, there is no place so sunny as the hearth of an old school