But presently something happened to make me forget him--something of
his own doing. A dance had ended, and after a breathing spell he began
to play an interlude. It was an instance of how tunes, like perfumes,
have the power to wake sleeping memories. The tune he was playing now,
simple and dreamy like a lullaby, and strangely at variance with the
surroundings, whisked me off in a twinkling, far from the actual--ten,
fifteen years backwards--to my student life in Paris, and set me to
thinking, as I had not thought for many a long day, of my hero,
friend, and comrade, Edmund Pair; for it was a tune of Pair's
composition, a melody he had written to a nursery rhyme, and used to
sing a good deal, half in fun, half in earnest, to his lady-love,
Godelinette:

'Lavender's blue, diddle-diddle,
Lavender's green;
When I am king, diddle-diddle,
You shall be queen.'

It is certain he meant very seriously that if he ever came into his
kingdom, Godelinette should be queen. The song had been printed, but,
so far as I knew, had never had much vogue; and it seemed an odd
chance that this evening, in a French seaport town where I was passing
a single night, I should stray by hazard into a sailors' pothouse and
hear it again.

* * * * *

Edmund Pair lived in the Latin Quarter when I did, but he was no
longer a mere student. He had published a good many songs; articles
had been written about them in the newspapers; and at his rooms you