But, as he continued to stare at the objects, the sluggish memories roused more and more; and for each bit of the old that reasserted itself scores of yards of the new seemed to disappear.  New shop-frontages went; a wall, brought up flush where formerly a recess had been, became the recess once more; the intermittent electric sign at the street’s end, that wrote in green and crimson the name of a whiskey across a lamp-lit facade, ceased to worry his eyes; and the unfamiliar new front of the little restaurant he was passing and repassing took on its old and well-known aspect again.

Seven o’clock.  He had thought, in dismissing his hansom, that it had been later.  His appointment was not until a quarter past.  But he decided against entering the restaurant and waiting inside; seeing who his guest was, it would be better to wait at the door.  By the light of the restaurant window he corrected his watch, and then sauntered a few yards along the street, to where men were moving flats of scenery from a back door of the new theatre into a sort of tumbril.  The theatre was twenty years old, but to Romarin it was “the new theatre.”  There had been no theatre there in his day.

In his day!...  His day had been twice twenty years before.  Forty years before, that street, that quarter, had been bound up in his life.  He had not, forty years ago, been the famous painter, honoured, decorated, taken by the arm by monarchs; he had been a student, wild and raw as any, with that tranquil and urbane philosophy that had made his success still in abeyance within him.  As his eyes had rested on the doorknocker next to the restaurant a smile had crossed his face.  How had that door-knocker come to be left by the old crowd that had wrenched off so many others?  By what accident had that survived, to bring back all the old life now so oddly?  He stood, again smiling, his hands folded on his stick.  A Crown Prince had given him that stick, and had had it engraved, “To my Friend, Romarin.”

“You oughtn’t to be here, you know,” he said to the door-knocker.  “If I didn’t get you, Marsden ought to have done so....”

It was Marsden whom Romarin had come to meet—­Marsden, of whom he had thought with such odd persistency lately.  Marsden was the only man in the world between whom and himself lay as much as the shadow of an enmity; and even that faint shadow was now passing.  One does not guard, for forty years, animosities that take their rise in quick outbreaks of the young blood; and, now that Romarin came to think of it, he hadn’t really hated Marsden for more than a few months.  It had been within those very doors (Romarin was passing the restaurant again) that there had been that quick blow, about a girl, and the tables had been pushed hastily back, and he and Marsden had fought, while the other fellows had kept the waiters away....  And Romarin was now sixty-four, and Marsden must be a year older, and the girl—­who knew?—­probably dead long ago ...  Yes, time heals these things, thank God; and Romarin had felt a genuine flush of pleasure when Marsden had accepted his invitation to dinner.