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.
George. "When did he leave town?"
Colonel Morley. "Three days ago."
George. "Three days ago! and for the Continent again."
Colonel Morley. "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."
George. "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!"
Colonel Morley. "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-
