Alwyn looked up—­his lips quivered.

“Poet—­poet!” he murmured—­“why taunt me with the name?” He started upright in his chair—­“Let me tell you all,” he said suddenly; “you may as well know what has made me the useless wreck I am; though perhaps I shall only weary you.”

“Far from it,” answered Heliobas gently.  “Speak freely—­but remember I do not compel your confidence.”

“On the contrary, I think you do!” and again that faint, half-mournful smile shone for an instant in his deep, dark eyes, “though you may not be conscious of it.  Anyhow I feel impelled to unburden my heart to you:  I have kept silence so long!  You know what it is in the world, ... one must always keep silence, always shut in one’s grief and force a smile, in company with the rest of the tormented, forced-smiling crowd.  We can never be ourselves—­ our veritable selves—­for, if we were, the air would resound with our ceaseless lamentations!  It is horrible to think of all the pent-up sufferings of humanity—­all the inconceivably hideous agonies that remain forever dumb and unrevealed!  When I was young,—­how long ago that seems! yes, though my actual years are taut thirty, I feel an alder-elde of accumulated centuries upon me—­when I was young, the dream of my life was Poesy.  Perhaps I inherited the fatal love of it from my mother—­she was a Greek-and she had a subtle music in her that nothing could quell, not even my father’s English coldness.  She named me Theos, little guessing what a dreary sarcasm that name would prove!  It was well, I think, that she died early.”

“Well for her, but perhaps not so well for you,” said Heliobas with a keen, kindly glance at him.

Alwyn sighed.  “Nay, well, for us both,—­for I should have chafed at her loving restraint, and she would unquestionably have been disappointed in me.  My father was a conscientious, methodical business man, who spent all his days up to almost the last moment of his life in amassing money, though it never gave him any joy so far as I could see, and when at his death I became sole possessor of his hardly-earned fortune, I felt far more sorrow than satisfaction.  I wished he had spent his gold on himself and left me poor, for it seemed to me I had need of nothing save the little I earned by my pen—­I was content to live an anchorite and dine off a crust for the sake of the divine Muse I worshipped.  Fate, however, willed it otherwise,—­and though I scarcely cared for the wealth I inherited, it gave me at least one blessing—­that of perfect independence.  I was free to follow my own chosen vocation, and for a brief wondering while I deemed myself happy, ... happy as Keats must have been when the fragment of ‘Hyperion’ broke from his frail life as thunder breaks from a summer-cloud.  I was as a monarch swaying a sceptre that commanded both earth and heaven; a kingdom was mine-a kingdom of golden ether, peopled with shining shapes Protean,—­alas! its gates are shut upon me now, and I shall enter it no more!”