Page:Whyte-Melville--Bones and I.djvu/141

 almost pain; letters crossed and re-crossed in delicate, orderly lines, bearing the well-known cipher, breathing the well-known perfume, telling the old, false tale in the old, false phrases, so trite and worn-out, yet seeming always so fresh and new

The hand that formed them has other tasks to occupy it now; the heart from which they came is mute and cold. Hope withers, love dies—times are altered. What would you have? It is a world of change. Nevertheless this has been a disheartening job; it has put me in low spirits; I must call "Bones" out of his cupboard to come and sit with me.

"What is this charm?" I ask him, "that seems to belong so exclusively to the past?—this 'tender grace of a day that is dead?' and must I look after it down the gulf into which it has dropped with such irrepressible longing only because it will