“Not bad!”

“Well, don’t let’s say anything more about it.  When will you come and see us?”

“What day will suit you—­some day next week?”

“Yes, I’m always in in the evening; will you come to dinner?”

Mike replied evasively, anxious not to commit himself to a promise for any day.  Then seeing that Frank thought he did not care to dine with him, he said—­

“Very well, let us say Wednesday.”

He bade his friend good-night, and stood on the edge of the pavement watching him make his way across the street to catch the last omnibus.  Mike’s mind filled with memories of Frank.  They came from afar, surging over the shores of youth, thundering along the cliffs of manhood.  Out of the remote regions of boyhood they came, white crests uplifted, merging and mingling in the waters of life.  It seemed to Mike that, like sea-weed, he and Frank had been washed together, and they then had been washed apart.  That was life, and that was the result of life, that and nothing more.  And of every adventure Frank was the most distinctly realizable; all else, even Lily, was a little shadow that had come and gone.  John had lost himself in religion, Frank had lost himself in his wife and child.  To lose yourself, that is the end to strive for; absorption in religion or in the family.  They had attained it, he had failed.  All the love and all the wealth fortune had poured upon him had not enabled him to stir from or change that entity which he knew as Mike Fletcher.  Ten years ago he had not a shilling to his credit, to-day he had several thousands, but the irreparable had not altered—­he was still Mike Fletcher.  He had wandered over the world; he had lain in the arms of a hundred women, and nothing remained of it all but Mike Fletcher.  There was apparently no escape; he was lashed to himself like the convict to the oar.  For him there was nothing but this oar, and all the jewelry that had been expended upon it had not made it anything but an oar.  There was a curse upon it all.

He saw Frank’s home—­the little parlour with its bits of furniture, scraggy and vulgar, but sweet with the presence of the wife and her homely occupations; then the children—­the chicks—­cooing and chattering, creating such hope and fond anxiety!  Why then did he not have wife and children?  Of all worldly possessions they are the easiest to obtain.  Because he had created a soul that irreparably separated him from these, the real and durable prizes of life; they lay beneath his hands, but his soul said no; he desired, and was powerless to take what he desired.