Lily Burton! —­ how emptily, how foolishly the name tinkled out of that empty and foolish past!  Yet what a power it had over him when he was three and twenty!  Of all the savage epithets which he afterwards attached to its owner, probably she merited a few.  She was a flirt, at all events.  She drew him on, played upon his emotions, found him, no doubt, excellent fun; and at last, when he was imbecile enough to declare himself, to talk of marriage, Lily, raising the drollest eyes, quietly wished to know what his prospects were.

The intolerable shame of it, even now!  But he laughed, mocking at his dead self.

His mind’s eye beheld the strange being a year later.  Still in good clothes, but unhealthy, and at his last half-crown; four and twenty, travelled, and possessed of the elements of culture, he had only just begun to realise the fact that men labour for their daily bread.  Was it the peculiar intensity of his egoism that so long blinded him to common anxieties?  Even as the last coins slipped between his fingers, he knew only a vaguely irritable apprehension.  Did he imagine the world would beg for the honour of feeding and clothing Mr. Harvey Rolfe?

It came back to him, his first experience of hunger —­ so very different a thing from appetite.  He saw the miserable bedroom where he sat on a rainy day.  He smelt the pawnshop.  His heart sank again under the weight of awful solitude.  Then, his illness; the letter he wrote to Amy; her visit to him; the help she brought.  But she could not persuade him to go back with her to Greystone to face the Doctor.  Her money was a loan; he would bestir himself and find occupation.  For a wonder, it was found —­ the place at the Emigration Agency; and so, for a good many years, the notable Mr. Harvey Rolfe sank into a life of obscure routine.

Again and again his sister Amy besought him to visit Greystone.  Dr Harvey was breaking up; would he not see the kind old man once more?  Yes, he assured himself that he would; but he took his time about it, and Dr Harvey, who at threescore and ten could not be expected to wait upon a young man’s convenience, one day very quietly died.  To Amy Rolfe, who had become as a daughter to him, he left the larger part of his possessions, an income of nine hundred a year.  Not long after this, Harvey met his sister, and was astonished to find her looking thin, pale, spiritless.  What did it mean?  Why did she gaze at him so sadly?  Come, come, he cried, she had been leading an unnatural life, cloistered, cheerless.  Now that she was independent, she must enjoy herself, see the world!  Brave words; and braver still those in which he replied to Amy’s entreaty that he would share her wealth.  Not he, indeed!  If, as she said, the Doctor meant and hoped it, why did he not make that plain in his will?  Not a penny would he take.  He had all he wanted.  And he seemed to himself the most magnanimous of men.

Amy lived on at Greystone; amid friends, to be sure, but silent, melancholy; and he, the brother whom she loved, could spare her only a day or two once a year, when he chattered his idle self-conceit.  Anyone else would have taken trouble to inquire the cause of her pallor, her sadness.  He, forsooth, had to learn with astonishment, at last, that she wished to see him —­ on her deathbed.