“Man’s life is at least thirty years too long.  Two score years is more than enough for us to say what we were sent here to say; and if you’ll consider those biographies in which you are most interested, the biographies of great writers, you cannot but bear me out.  What, for instance, did Keats and Shelley and Burns and Byron lose by dying, all of them long before they were forty,—­Keats even long before he was thirty; and what did Wordsworth and Coleridge gain by living so long after?  Wordsworth and Coleridge didn’t even live to repeat themselves, else, of course, one would have begged them to go on living for ever; for some repetitions, it is admitted, are welcome,—­for instance, won’t you have a little more whisky?”

Henry always agreed so completely with Gerard’s talk, or at least so delighted in it, that he had little scope of opportunity to say much himself; and Gerard was too keen a talker to complain of a rapt young listener.

“How old are you?” he said, presently.

“Twenty-two next month.”

“Twenty-two!  How wonderful to be twenty-two!  Yet I don’t suppose you’ve realised it in the least.  In your own view, you’re an aged philosopher, white with a past, and bowed down with the cares of a future.  Just you stay in bed all day to-morrow, and ponder on the wonderfulness of being twenty-two!

“I’m forty-two.  You’re beginning—­I’m done with.  And yet, in some ways, I believe I’m younger than you—­though, perhaps, alas! what I consider the youth in me is only the wish to be young again, the will to do and enjoy, without the force and the appetite.  But, by the way, when I say I’m forty-two, I mean that I’m forty-two in the course of next week, next Thursday, in fact, and if you’ll do me that kindness, I should be grateful if you would join me that evening in celebrating the melancholy occasion.  I’ve got a great mind to enlist your sympathy in a little ancient history, if it won’t be too great a tax upon your goodness; but I’ll think it over between now and then.”

Gerard’s birthday had come; and the ancient history he had spoken of had proved to be a chapter of his own history, the beauty and sadness of which had made an impression upon Henry, to be rendered ineffaceable a very few days after in a sudden and terrible manner.

One early morning about four, just as it was growing light, he had suddenly awakened with a strong feeling that some one was bending over him.  He opened his eyes, to see, as he thought, Gerard hastily leaving his bedside.

“Gerard!” he cried, “what’s the matter?” but the figure gave no answer, faded away down the long room, and disappeared.  Henry sat up in bed and struck a light, his heart beating violently.  But there was no one there, and the door was closed.  It had evidently been one of those dreams that persist on the eye for a moment after waking.  Yet it left him uneasy; and presently he wondered if Gerard could be ill.  He determined to see; so, slipping on his dressing-gown, he crossed the landing to Gerard’s room, and, softly knocking, opened the door and put in his head.