but I abstained--I didn't want to compromise him; and I never came
across him again.

Often and often, in dining out, I looked for him, sometimes
accepting invitations on purpose to multiply the chances of my
meeting him. But always in vain; so that as I met many other
members of the casual class over and over again I at last adopted
the theory that he always procured a list of expected guests
beforehand and kept away from the banquets which he thus learned I
was to grace. At last I gave up hope, and one day at the end of
three years I received another visit from his aunt. She was
drearier and dingier, almost squalid, and she was in great
tribulation and want. Her sister, Mrs. Brooksmith, had been dead a
year, and three months later her nephew had disappeared. He had
always looked after her a bit since her troubles; I never knew what
her troubles had been--and now she hadn't so much as a petticoat to
pawn. She had also a niece, to whom she had been everything before
her troubles, but the niece had treated her most shameful. These
were details; the great and romantic fact was Brooksmith's final
evasion of his fate. He had gone out to wait one evening as usual,
in a white waistcoat she had done up for him with her own hands--
being due at a large party up Kensington way. But he had never
come home again and had never arrived at the large party, nor at
any party that any one could make out. No trace of him had come to
light--no gleam of the white waistcoat had pierced the obscurity of
his doom. This news was a sharp shock to me, for I had my ideas
about his real destination. His aged relative had promptly, as she
said, guessed the worst. Somehow, and somewhere he had got out of
the way altogether, and now I trust that, with characteristic
deliberation, he is changing the plates of the immortal gods. As