of good style.  He had once studied an art, and had hopes and aspirations, who now, in his age, was come to serve the revels of a set of drunken sailors, in a disreputable tavern, where they danced with prostitutes.  I don’t know why, but from the first he drew my attention; and I left my handmaid to count her charms neglected, while I sat and watched him, speculating about him in a melancholy way, with a sort of vicarious shame.

But presently something happened to make me forget him—­something of his own doing.  A dance had ended, and after a breathing spell he began to play an interlude.  It was an instance of how tunes, like perfumes, have the power to wake sleeping memories.  The tune he was playing now, simple and dreamy like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual—­ten, fifteen years backwards—­to my student life in Paris, and set me to thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero, friend, and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair’s composition, a melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to sing a good deal, half in fun, half in earnest, to his lady-love, Godelinette: 

    ’Lavender’s blue, diddle-diddle,
        Lavender’s green;
    When I am king, diddle-diddle,
        You shall be queen.’

It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his kingdom, Godelinette should be queen.  The song had been printed, but, so far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd chance that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was passing a single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors’ pothouse and hear it again.

* * * * *

Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no longer a mere student.  He had published a good many songs; articles had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you would meet the men who had ’arrived’—­actors, painters, musicians, authors, and now and then a politician—­who thus recognised him as more or less one of themselves.  Everybody liked him; everybody said, ‘He is splendidly gifted; he will go far.’  A few of us already addressed him, half-playfully perhaps, as cher maitre.

He was three or four years older than I—­eight- or nine-and-twenty to my twenty-five—­and I was still in the schools; but for all that we were great chums.  Quite apart from his special talent, he was a remarkable man—­amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate.  He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts and conditions of people.  He had wit, imagination, humour, and a voice that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear.  For myself, I admired him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of my hero-worship, and the lion’s share of my friendship; perhaps I was vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy.  We used to