in a good humour, I consented to see him.  He was a young man of about twenty, and his shabby clothes could not conceal that he was comely.  He entered the room with light step and chin in air, and to my surprise he strode over to where I sat and seated himself without a word.  Then he looked at me with his blue eyes, and I recognised him with a start ‘What’s the new book?’ he asked eagerly, pointing to my open bank-book.

Bending over he looked at it:  ’Pshaw!  Figures.  You used not to care much about them.  When we were together it used to be Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, or Shakespeare’s Sonnets!’

As he spoke he tugged a faded copy of the Sonnets from his pocket.  It slipped from his hand.  As it fell it opened, and faded violets rained from its leaves.  The youth gathered them up carefully, as though they had been valuable, and replaced them.

‘How do you sell your violets?’ I asked, ironically.  ’I’ll give you a pound apiece for them!’

‘A pound!  Twenty pounds apiece wouldn’t buy them,’ he laughed, and I remembered that they were the violets Alice Sunshine and I had gathered one spring day when I was twenty.  We had found them in a corner of the dingle, where I had been reading the Sonnets to her, till in our book that day we read no more.  As we parted she pressed them between the leaves and kissed them.  I remember, too, that I had been particular to write the day and hour against them, and I remember further how it puzzled me a couple of years after what the date could possibly mean.

Having secured his book, my visitor once more looked me straight in the face, and as he did so he seemed to grow perplexed and disappointed.  As I gazed at him my contentment, too, seemed to be slowly melting away.  Five minutes before I had felt the most comfortable bourgeois in the world.  There seemed nothing I was in need of, but there was something about this youth that was dangerously disillusionising.  Here was I already envying him his paltry violets.  I was even weak enough to offer him five pounds apiece for them, but he still smilingly shook his head.

‘Well!’ he said presently, ’what have you been doing with yourself all these years?’

I told him of my marriage and my partnership in a big city house.

‘Phew!’ he said.  ’Monstrous dull, isn’t it?  As for me, I never intend to marry.  And if you don’t marry, what do you want with money?  You used to despise it enough once.  And do you remember our favourite line:  “Our loves into corpses or wives?"’

‘Hush!’ I said, for wives have ears.

‘Is it Alice Sunshine?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said, ‘not Alice Sunshine.’

‘Maud Willow?’

‘No, not Maud Willow.’

‘Jenny Hopkins?’

‘No, not Jenny Hopkins.’

‘Lucy Rainbow?’

‘No, not Lucy Rainbow.’

’Now who else was there?  I cannot remember them all.  Ah, I remember now.  It wasn’t Lilian, after all?’