on the table.  Bananas were an acquired taste with them, they had learned to eat the fruit for love of their friend, and since he has gone they have not eaten the chicken roast nor the fruit, and it seems to them that they should have eaten of these things in memory of him.  In the Spring they come upon his pruning-knife, and discourse sadly on the changes he would have advised.  Spring opens into summer, and when summer drops into the autumn Kilcarney’s black passes into grey; he appears one morning in a violet tie, and the tie, picked out of a drawer with indifferent hand, causes Violet to doubt her husband’s constancy.  It was soon after this thoughtless act that he began, for the thousandth time, to remind her that the world might be searched in its dimmest corners and no friend again found like the one they had lost. . . .  The reflection had become part of their habitual thought, and, feeling a little trite and commonplace, Violet listened, or half-listened, engulfed in retrospect.

‘I met in Merrion Square,’ and she mentioned a name, ’and do you know whom he seemed to be very like?’ The colour died out of Kilcarney’s cheek and he could but murmur, ‘Oh, Violet!’ and colouring at being caught up on what might be looked upon as a mental infidelity, she answered, ’of course, none is like him . . .  I wish you would not seek to misunderstand me.’

The matter passed off, but next evening she sat looking at her husband, her thoughts suspended for so long that he began to fear, wrongly however, that she was about to put forward some accusation, to twit him perchance on his lack of loyalty to his dead friend.  He had not eaten a banana for dinner, though he had intended to eat one.  ’Of course, we shall never find anyone like him,’ she said—­’not if we were to search all the corners of the world.  That is so, we’re both agreed on that point, but I’ve been thinking which of all our friends and acquaintances would least unworthily fill his place in our lives.’  ‘Violet!  Violet!’ ‘If you persist in misunderstanding me,’ she answered, ’I have no more to say,’ whereupon the Marquis tried to persuade the Marchioness out of the morose silence that had fallen upon them, and failing to move her he raised the question that had divided them.  ’If you mean, Violet, that our racing friend would be a poor shift for our dead friend, meaning thereby that nobody in Dublin is comparable’—­’could I have meant anything else, you old dear?’ she replied; and the ice having been broken, the twain plunged at once into the waters of recollection, and coming upon a current they were borne onward, swiftly and more swiftly, till at length a decision had to be come to—­they would invite their racing friend.