his lips—' for his mother's sake,' she had said in her heart, as she slipped away and was seen no more.

'If this were fiction, instead of a veracious study from life,' to make use of a phrase which one rarely finds out of a novel, it would be unfitting to let such an incident as that just related fall to the ground, except as the seed of future development; but, this being as I have stated, there is nothing more to say of that winning ouvrière. Narcissus saw her no more.

But surely, of all men, he could best afford that one such pleasant chance should put forth no other blossom save that half-dreamed kiss;—and how can one ever foresee but that our so cherishable spray of bloom may in time add but another branch to that orchard of Dead Sea fruit which grows inevitably about all men's dwellings?

I do not suppose that Narcissus was really as exceptional in the number and character of his numerous boyish loves as we always regarded him as being. It is no uncommon matter, of course and alas! for a youth between the ages of seventeen and nineteen to play the juggler at keeping three, or even half-a-dozen, female correspondents going at once, each of whom sleeps nightly with copious documentary evidence of her sole and incontrovertible possession of the sacred heart. Nor has Narcissus been the only lover, I suspect, who, in the season of the waning of the moon, has sent such excuses for scrappy epistolary make-shifts as 'the strident din of an office, an air so cruelly unsympathetic, as frost to buds, to the blossoming of all those words of love that press for birth,' when, as a matter of fact, he has been unblushingly eating the lotus, in the laziest chair at home, in the quietest night of summer. Such insincerity is a common besetting sin of the young male; invariably, I almost think, if he has the artistic temperament. Yet I do not think it presents itself to his mind in its nudity, but comes clothed with that sophistry in which youth, the most thoroughgoing of philosophes, is so ingenious. Consideration for the beloved object, it is called—yes! beloved indeed, though, such is the paradox in the order of things, but one of the several vestals of the sacred fire. One cannot help occasional disinclination on a lazy evening, confound it! but it makes one twinge to think of paining her with such a confession; and a story of that sort—well, it's a lie, of course; but it's one without any harm, any seed of potential ill, in it. So the letter goes, maybe to take its place as the 150th of the sacred writings, and make poor Daffodilia, who has loved to count the growing score, happy with the completion of the half-century.

But the disinclination goes not, though the poor passion has, of course, its occasional leapings in the socket, and the pain has to come at last, for all that dainty consideration, which, moreover, has been all the time feeding larger capacities for suffering. For, of course, no man thinks of marrying his twelfth love, though in the thirteenth there is usually danger; and he who has jilted, so to say, an earl's daughter as his sixth, may come to see

in the thirteenth Miss Simpkins.

But this is to write as an outsider: for that thirteenth, by a mystical process which has given to each of its series in its day the same primal quality, is, of course, not only the last, but the first. And, indeed, with little casuistry, that thirteenth may be truly held to be the first, for it is a fact determined not so much by the chosen maid as by him who chooses, though he himself is persuaded quite otherwise. To him his amorous career has been hitherto an unsuccessful pursuit, because each followed fair in turn, when at length he has caught her flying skirts, and looked into her face, has proved not that 'ideal'—

but another, to be shaken free again in disappointment. In truth, however, the lack has been in himself all this time. He had yet to learn what loving indeed meant: and he loves the thirteenth, not because she is pre-eminent beyond the rest, but because she has come to him at the moment when that 'lore of loving' has been revealed. Had any of those earlier maidens fallen on the happy conjunction, they would, doubtless, have proved no less loveworthy, and seemed no less that 'ideal' which they have since become, one may be sure, for some other illuminated soul.

Of course, some find that love early—the baby-love, whom one never marries, and then the faithful service. Probably it happens so with the majority of men; for it is, I think, especially to the artist nature that it comes thus late. Living so vividly within the circle of its own experience, by its very constitution so necessarily egoistic, the latter, more particularly in its early years, is always a Narcissus, caring for nought or none except in so much as they reflect back its own beauty or its own dreams. The face such a youth looks for, as he turns the coy captured head to meet his glance, is, quite unconsciously, his own, and the 'ideal' he seeks is but the perfect mirror. Yet it is not that mirror he marries after all: for when at last he has come to know what that word—one so distasteful, so 'soiled' to his ear 'with all ignoble' domesticity—what that word 'wife' really expresses, he has learnt, too, to discredit those cynical guides of his youth who love so well to write Ego as the last word of human nature.

But the particular Narcissus of whom I write was a long way off that thirteenth maid in the days of his antiquarian rambles and his Pagan-Catholic ardours, and the above digression is at least out of date.

A copy of Keats which I have by me as I write is a memorial of one of the pretty loves typical of that period. It is marked all through in black lead—not so gracefully as one would have expected from the 'taper fingers' which held the pencil, but rather, it would appear, more with regard to emphasis than grace. Narcissus had lent it to the queen of the hour with special instructions to that end, so that when it came to him again he might ravish his soul with the hugging assurance given by the thick lead to certain ecstatic lines of Endymion, such as—

and luxuriate in a genial sense of godship where the tremulous pencil had left the record of a sigh against—

But it was a magnanimous godship; and, after a moment's leaning back with closed eyes, to draw in all the sweet incense, how nobly would he act, in imaginative vignette, the King Cophetua to this poor suppliant of love; with what a generous waiving of his power—and with what a grace!—did he see himself raising her from her knees, and seating her at his right hand. Yet those pencil-marks, alas! mark but a secondary interest in that volume. A little sketch on the fly-leaf, 'by another hand,' witness the prettier memory. A sacred valley, guarded by smooth, green hills; in the midst a little lake, fed at one end by a singing stream, swallowed at the other by the roaring darkness of a mill; green rushes prosperous in the shallows, and along the other bank an old hedgerow; a little island in the midst, circled by silver lilies; and in the distance, rising from out a cloud of tangled green, above the little river, an old church tower. Below, though not 'in the picture,' a quaint country house, surrounded by a garden of fair fruit-trees and wonderful bowers, through which ran the stream, free once again, and singing for joy of the light. In the great lone house a solitary old man, cherished and ruled by—'The Miller's Daughter.' Was scene ever more in need of a fairy prince? Narcissus sighed, as he broke upon it one rosy