Behind the counter of a chemist’s shop in Oxford Street there served, day after day, a young assistant much observed of female customers.  The young man was handsome, and not with that vulgar handsomeness which is fairly common among the better kind of shop-walkers and counter-keepers.  He had rather long black hair, which arranged itself in silky ripples about a face of perfectly clear, though rather dark, complexion.  When he smiled, as he frequently did, the effect was very pleasant.  He spoke, too, with that musical intonation which is always more or less suggestive of musical thought.  He did not seem by any means ideally adapted to the place he occupied here, yet filled it without suspicion of constraint or uneasiness:  there was nothing in him to make one suppose that he had ever been accustomed to a better sphere of life.

He lived in the house above the shop, and had done so for about two years; previously he had held a like position in a more modest establishment.  His bed-room, which had to serve him as sitting-room also during his free hours, gave indications of a taste not ordinarily found in chemists’ assistants.  On the walls were several engravings of views in Rome, ancient and modern; and there were two bookcases filled with literature which had evidently known the second-hand stall,—­most of the Latin poets, a few Italian books, and some English classics.  Not a trace anywhere of the habits and predilections not unfairly associated with the youth of the shop, not even a pipe or a cigar-holder.  It was while sitting alone here one evening, half musing, half engaged in glancing over the advertisements in a paper two days old, that the assistant had been attracted by the insertion just quoted.  He read and re-read it, became more thoughtful, sighed slightly.  Then he moved to the table and took some note-paper out of a writing-case.  Still he seemed to be in doubt, hesitated in pressing a pen against his thumb-nail, was on the point of putting the note-paper away again.  Ultimately, however, he sat down to write.  He covered four pages with a letter, which he then proceeded deliberately to correct and alter, till he had cut it down by about half.  Then came another period of doubt before he decided to make a fair copy.  But it was finally made, and the signature at the foot was:  Julian Casti.

He went out at once to the post.

Two days later he received a reply, somewhat longer than his own epistle.  The writer was clearly keeping himself in a tentative attitude.  Still, he wrote something about his own position and his needs.  He was a teacher in a school in South London, living in lodgings, with his evenings mostly unoccupied.  His habits, he declared, were Bohemian.  Suppose, by way of testing each other’s dispositions, they were to interchange views on some book with which both were likely to be acquainted:  say, Keats’s poems?  In conclusion, the “O.  W.” of the advertisement signed himself Osmond Waymark.