’We’ll talk about that presently, Mr. Spicer.  Tell me all about your accident.  How came you to be in the front room?’

‘Ah, sir,’ replied the patient, with a little shake of the head, ’that indeed was singular.  Only a few days before, I had made a removal from my room into yours.  I call it yours, sir, for I always thought of it as yours; but thank heaven you were not there.  Only a few days before.  I took that step, Mr. Goldthorpe, for two reasons:  first, because water was coming through the roof at the back in rather unpleasant quantities, and secondly, because I hoped to get a little morning sun in the front.  The fact is, sir, my room had been just a little depressing.  Ah, Mr. Goldthorpe, if you knew how I have missed you, sir!  But the work—­what news of the work?’

Smiling as though carelessly, the author made known his good fortune.  For a quarter of an hour Mr. Spicer could talk of nothing else.

‘This has completed my cure!’ he kept repeating.  ’The work was composed under my roof, my own roof, sir!  Did I not tell you to take heart?’

‘And where are you going to live?’ asked Goldthorpe presently.  ’You can’t go back to the old house.’

’Alas! no, sir.  All my life I have dreamt of the joy of owning a house.  You know how the dream was realised, Mr. Goldthorpe, and you see what has come of it at last.  Probably it is a chastisement for overweening desires, sir.  I should have remembered my position, and kept my wishes within bounds.  But, Mr. Goldthorpe, I shall continue to cultivate the garden, sir.  I shall put in spring lettuces, and radishes, and mustard and cress.  The property is mine till midsummer day.  You shall eat a lettuce of my growing, Mr. Goldthorpe; I am bent on that.  And how I grieve that you were not with me at the time of the artichokes—­just at the moment when they were touched by the first frost!’

‘Ah!  They were really good, Mr. Spicer?’

’Sir, they seemed good to me, very good.  Just at the moment of the first frost!’

A CAPITALIST

Among the men whom I saw occasionally at the little club in Mortimer Street,—­and nowhere else,—­was one who drew my attention before I had learnt his name or knew anything about him.  Of middle age, in the fullness of health and vigour, but slenderly built; his face rather shrewd than intellectual, interesting rather than pleasing; always dressed as the season’s mode dictated, but without dandyism; assuredly he belonged to the money-spending, and probably to the money-getting, world.  At first sight of him I remember resenting his cap-a-pie perfection; it struck me as bad form—­here in Mortimer Street, among fellows of the pen and the palette.

‘Oh,’ said Harvey Munden, ’he’s afraid of being taken for one of us.  He buys pictures.  Not a bad sort, I believe, if it weren’t for his snobbishness.’