H*NRY J*M*S


It was with the sense of a, for him, very memorable something that
he peered now into the immediate future, and tried, not without
compunction, to take that period up where he had, prospectively, left
it. But just where the deuce _had_ he left it? The consciousness of
dubiety was, for our friend, not, this morning, quite yet clean-cut
enough to outline the figures on what she had called his "horizon,"
between which and himself the twilight was indeed of a quality
somewhat intimidating. He had run up, in the course of time, against
a good number of "teasers;" and the function of teasing them back--of,
as it were, giving them, every now and then, "what for"--was in him so
much a habit that he would have been at a loss had there been, on the
face of it, nothing to lose. Oh, he always had offered rewards, of
course--had ever so liberally pasted the windows of his soul with
staring appeals, minute descriptions, promises that knew no bounds.
But the actual recovery of the article--the business of drawing and
crossing the cheque, blotched though this were with tears of joy--had
blankly appeared to him rather in the light of a sacrilege, casting,
he sometimes felt, a palpable chill on the fervour of the next quest.
It was just this fervour that was threatened as, raising himself on
his elbow, he stared at the foot of his bed. That his eyes refused
to rest there for more than the fraction of an instant, may be
taken--_was_, even then, taken by Keith Tantalus--as a hint of his
recollection that after all the phenomenon wasn't to be singular. Thus
the exact repetition, at the foot of Eva's bed, of the shape pendulous
at the foot of _his_ was hardly enough to account for the fixity with
which he envisaged it, and for which he was to find, some years later,