“No, I never mention names; besides, I am not certain she gave her right name.”

“Are you sure she was staying at the castle?  For if so, there would be no use for her to conceal her name.  You could easily have found it out.”

“Oh, yes, she was staying at the castle; she talked about you all.  Don’t you believe me?”

“What, all about the nymph?  I am certain you thought you ought to have loved her, and if what Harding says is right, that there is more truth in what we think than in what we do, I’m sure you might say that you had been on a wedding-tour with one of the gargoyles.”

Mike laughed; and Frank did not suspect that he had annoyed him.  Mike’s mother was a Frenchwoman, whom John Fletcher had met in Dublin and had pressed into a sudden marriage.  At the end of three years of married life she had been forced to leave him, and strange were the legends of the profanities of that bed.  She fled one day, taking her son with her.  Fletcher did not even inquire where she had gone; and when at her death Mike returned to Ireland, he found his father in a small lodging-house playing the flute.  Scarcely deigning to turn his head, he said—­“Oh! is that you, Mike?—­sit down.”

At his father’s death, Mike had sold the lease of the farm for three hundred pounds, and with that sum and a volume of verse he went to London.  When he had published his poems he wrote two comedies.  His efforts to get them produced led him into various society.  He was naturally clever at cards, and one night he won three hundred pounds.  Journalism he had of course dabbled in—­he was drawn towards it by his eager impatient nature; he was drawn from it by his gluttonous and artistic nature.  Only ten pounds for an article, whereas a successful “bridge” brought him ten times that amount, and he revolted against the column of platitudes that the hours whelmed in oblivion.  There had been times, however, when he had been obliged to look to journalism for daily bread.  The Spectator, always open to young talent, had published many of his poems; the Saturday had welcomed his paradoxes and strained eloquence; but whether he worked or whether he idled he never wanted money.  He was one of those men who can always find five pounds in the streets of London.

We meet Mike in his prime—­in his twenty-ninth year—­a man of various capabilities, which an inveterate restlessness of temperament had left undeveloped—­a man of genius, diswrought with passion, occasionally stricken with ambition.

“Let me have those glasses.  There she is!  I am sure it is she—­there, leaning against the Embankment.  Yes, yes, it is she.  Look at her.  I should know her figure among a thousand—­those frail shoulders, that little waist; you could break her like a reed.  How sweet she is on that background of flowing water, boats, wharfs, and chimneys; it all rises about her like a dream, and all is as faint upon the radiant air as a dream upon happy sleep.  So she is coming to see me.  She will keep her promise.  I shall love her.  I feel at last that love is near me.  Supposing I were to marry her?”