In the evening I read and meditated on the happiness of my lot.  The years of school drudgery have already lost their sharp edge of remembered definition, and sometimes I wonder whether it is I who lived through them.  I had not a care in the world, not a want that I could not gratify.  I thought of Judith.  I thought of Sebastian Pasquale.  I amused myself by seeking a Renaissance type of which he must be the reincarnation.  I fixed upon young Olgiati, one of the assassins of Gian Galeazzo Sforza.  Of the many hundreds of British youths who passed before my eyes during my slavery, he is the only one who has sought me out in his manhood.  And strange to say we had only a few months together, during my first year’s apprenticeship to the dismal craft, he being in the sixth form, and but three or four years younger than I. He was the maddest, oddest, most diabolical and most unpopular boy in the school.  The staff, to whom the conventional must of necessity be always the Divine, loathed him.  I alone took to the creature.  I think now that my quaint passion for the cinquecento Italian must have had something to do with my attraction.  In externals he is as English as I am, having been brought up in England by an English mother, but there are thousands of Hindoos who are more British than he.  The McMurrays were telling me dreadful stories about him this afternoon.  Sighing after an obdurate Viennese dancer, he had lured her coachman into helpless intoxication, had invested himself in the domestic’s livery, and had driven off with the lady in the darkness after the performance to the outskirts of the town.  What happened exactly, the McMurrays did not know; but there was the devil to pay in Vienna.  And yet this inconsequent libertine did the following before my own eyes.  We were walking down Piccadilly together one afternoon in the hard winter of 1894.  It was a black frost, agonizingly cold.  A shivering wretch held out matches for sale.  His hideous red toes protruded through his boots.  “My God, my God!” cried Pasquale, “I can’t stand this!” He jumped into a crawling hansom, tore off his own boots, flung them to the petrified beggar and drove home in his stocking-feet.  I stood on the curb and, with mingled feelings, watched the recipient, amid an interested group of bystanders, match the small shapely sole against his huge foot, and with a grin tuck the boots under his arm and march away with them to the nearest pawnbroker.  If Pasquale had been an equally compassionate Briton, he would have stopped to think, and have tossed the man a sovereign. But he didn’t stop to think. That was my cinquecento Pasquale.  And I loved him for it.