CHAPTER I

It was the first, the very first, day of spring. A man walked by me with a narcissus in his coat and he was humming a tune.

It

By the looks of him—the tail-coat, the bowler hat, the little leather hand-bag—he was an artisan. You know that game of placing people. I put him down as an electrician. He had been attending to a job up West. He was returning to the premises of his firm in Bond Street. All this, of course, was surmise. But of one thing I was certain. He had no business to be walking through the Park. He ought to have been on a 'bus, or in the Underground Railway, speeding back to save his firm's most precious time, ready to start forth once more upon his firm's most urgent errands. Instead of this—it was the first day of spring—he was walking through the Park and I was envying him. I envied the narcissus in his coat. Even the very tune he was humming touched a sense of covetousness in my heart.

"Nor his ox," thought I, "nor his ass, nor anything that is his." A very stern Commandment that; for even as I took off my silk hat and brushed the rim of it once with my sleeve, I envied him for his tail-coat and his billy-cock.

It was little enough to want of any man, his tail-coat or his billy-cock, his narcissus or the tune set humming from his heart. I did not want his leather bag at all. He could keep that. Yet it seemed that I was to break the tenth decree of Moses to its last letter, or, since I was going backwards, to its first; for after he had gone by some thirty yards or so, I was envying him for something else altogether.

A few moments before he came, a little nursemaid had wheeled her pram down the path where I was sitting. She was one of those rosy-cheeked creatures who come up from the country to grow pale in London, just as the flowers come up of a morning to Covent Garden and wither perhaps before the night is out. She must have been very new to it all, for she had all the country freshness about her still. Her cheeks glowed in the quick, bright air. Her hair blew loosely over her forehead—through the stray, fine threads of it her eyes danced, glittering with youth. I remember now of what it must have reminded me. You have seen those spiders' webs, caught on the points of furze which, early on a crisp May morning, glisten with drops of dew? Those eyes of hers through her hair reminded me of that. And as she passed me by, leaning forward again and again to whisper to that fat, round baby in the pram, she chanced to look at me.

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