This they said many times, and at length they came to a room that had a door white as ivory, and I caught a breath of freshest flowers as they opened and passed in.

Then I closed my eyes, and when I looked again I thought an angel stood on the threshold, as I had seen it somewhere in Victor Hugo—­a happy angel with finger upon his lip.

And when the dream had gone, and I was once more alone, I said ’Jim is working, Siss is waiting, and I—­am eating borrowed oysters.’

Then I took out the sovereign and looked at it, for it was now symbolic.  Outside, above the street, a star was shining.  I had filched a beam of Siss’s star.  Was it less bright tonight?  Had she missed this sovereign?

It had been symbolic before—­a sovereign’s-worth of the world, the flesh, and the devil; now it was a sovereign’s-worth of holy love and home.  Every penny I spent of it dimmed that star, delayed that home.  In my pocket it meant a sovereign’s-worth more working and waiting.  Pay it back again into that star, and it was a sovereign nearer home.  Yes, it was a sovereign’s-worth of that flat, of that escritoire, those books, those burning candles, that photograph, that ivory-white door, those sweet-smelling flowers, a sovereign’s-worth of that angel, I was keeping in my pocket.

Out on it!  God forgive me.  I had not thought it meant that to borrow a sovereign from Jim, meant that to eat those borrowed oysters.  Nevertheless, they had not been all an immoral indulgence.  Even oysters may be the instruments of virtue in the hands of Providence.

The shopman knew me, so I ‘confounded it’ and told him I had come out without my purse.  It was all right.  Pay next time, Jim’s theatre was close by, it was but a stone’s-throw to the stage-door.  Easy to leave him a note.  What will he think, I wonder, as he reads it, and the sovereign rolls out:  ’Dear old man, forgive me—­I forgot it was a sovereign’s-worth of home.’

Yet, after all, it was the oysters that did this thing.

ANARCHY IN A LIBRARY

(A FABLE FOR SOCIALISTS)

Having occasion recently to re-arrange my books, they lay in bewildering jumbled heaps upon my study floor; and, having in vain puzzled over this plan and that which should give the little collection a continuity such as it had never attained before, I at length gave it up in despair, and sat, with my head in my hands, hopeless.  Presently I seemed to hear small voices talking in whispers, a curious papery tone, like the fluttering of leaves, and listening I heard distinctly these words:—­’The great era of universal equality and redistribution has dawned at last.  No one book shall any longer claim more shelf than another, no book shall be taller or thicker than another.  The age of folios and quartos is past, and the Age of the Universal Octavo has dawned.’