Dandy," said I, and I looked him steadily in the eyes. At last he knew, and I had to turn away. It was too piteous, the expression then that twisted his face.

With his tail a limp and a foolish-looking thing, he stood upon the doorstep and saw me drive off. I waved a hand out of the window at him, but I could not look back.

It was that wave of the hand that did it. He knew I had been playing him a joke. There I was, beckoning to him just before it was too late and, roaring with laughter—so I am told—to think how nearly I had taken him in, he leapt after me.

When I got out of the taxi at Victoria, to my amazement, there he was, splashed with mud behind our wheels from nose to tail.

"A jolly good joke!" he roared. "A jolly good joke! I knew there must have been some mistake." And so there was, but the poor little devil had to pay for it at Algiers.

What good then was Italy to us after such journeys as these? We walked back home to lunch that morning, Dandy forlorn, I with the taste of envy still lingering in my mind.

How can I explain? Life has never reached me. No woman has ever come to me in trouble—and that is part of life; no man has ever told the story of a love affair to me in the whole course of my existence. Whenever a man sees me he slaps me on the back; whenever I meet a woman whom I know, she pats Dandy on the back instead. And to suggest Italy for such a disease as that!

A night or two later, I strolled into a restaurant where occasionally I sup alone. The young man and the young woman go there. Corks fly out of bottles and laughter flies after them. Sometimes there I can imagine I have never seen forty, and when I assure myself that I am forty-three, it seems nothing—nothing at all. The waters of Lethe are in the very finger-bowls on their tables, though often indeed, as I have rubbed it on my lips, it seems I have tasted the waters of Marah. That night after supper, I sat in the lounge outside, taking my coffee. At the other end of the settee I had chosen sat a woman of twenty-eight, listening patiently to the egotism of a boy of twenty-six. Here and there she placed a word with cunning knowledge of his kind. Now and again she laughed, when immediately rose his empty bark above it. At times he laughed all by himself.

"I suppose I shall have to marry her one of these days and settle down," I heard him say, and from that moment my ears caught no sound other than their two 

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