And what a night that was! what a talk!  How soon did we find each other out!  Long before the maid knocked at the door, and hinted by the delicate insinuation of a supposed ring that there was ’a budding morrow’ in the air.  But our passionate generosity of soul was running in too strong a tide just then to be stemmed by any such interference; it could but be diverted, and Muncaster’s bedroom served us as well wherein to squat in one of those close, rapt circles of talk such as, I think, after all, men who love poetry can alone know—­men, anyhow, with a poetry.

Bed, that had for some time been calling us, unheeded as Juliet’s nurse, had at last to be obeyed; but how grudgingly; and how eagerly we sprang from it at no late hour in the morning, at the first thought of the sweet new thing that had come into the world—­like children who, half in a doze before waking, suddenly remember last night’s new wonder of a toy, to awake in an instant, and scramble into clothes to look at it again.  Thus, like children we rose; but it was shy as lovers we met at the breakfast-table, as lovers shy after last night’s kissing. (You may not have loved a fellow-man in this way, Reader, but we are, any one of us, as good men as you; so keep your eyebrows down, I beseech you.)

One most winsome trait of our new friend was soon apparent—­as, having, to our sorrow, to part at the inn door right and left, we talked of meeting again at one or the other’s home:  a delicate disinclination to irreverently ‘make sure’ of the new joy; a ‘listening fear,’ as though of a presiding good spirit that might revoke his gift if one stretched out towards it with too greedy hands.  ’Rather let us part and say nought.  You know where a letter will find me.  If our last night was a real thing, we shall meet again, never fear.’  With some such words as those it was that he bade us good-bye.

Of course, letters found all three of us before a fortnight had gone by, and in but a short time we found his home.  There it is that George should be seen.  Away he is full of precious light, but home is his setting.  To Narcissus, who found it in that green period when all youngsters take vehement vows of celibacy, and talk much of ‘free love,’ all ignorant, one is in charity persuaded, of what they quite mean, that home was certainly as great and lasting a revelation as the first hour of ‘Poetry’s divine first finger-touch.’  It was not that his own home-life had been unhappy, for it was the reverse, and rich indeed in great and sweet influences; but it was rather, I think, that the ideal of a home is not so easily to be reached from that home in which one is a child, where one is too apt to miss the whole in consideration of one’s own part in it, as from another on which we can look from the outside.