Rickie spoke again, but received no answer. He paced a little up
and down the sombre roam. Then he sat on the edge of the table
and watched his clever friend draw within the square a circle,
and within the circle a square, and inside that another circle,
and inside that another square.

"Whv will you do that?"

No answer.

"Are they real?"

"The inside one is--the one in the middle of everything, that
there's never room enough to draw."



II

A little this side of Madingley, to the left of the road, there
is a secluded dell, paved with grass and planted with fir-trees.
It could not have been worth a visit twenty years ago, for then
it was only a scar of chalk, and it is not worth a visit at the
present day, for the trees have grown too thick and choked it.
But when Rickie was up, it chanced to be the brief season of its
romance, a season as brief for a chalk-pit as a man--its divine
interval between the bareness of boyhood and the stuffiness of
age. Rickie had discovered it in his second term, when the
January snows had melted and left fiords and lagoons of clearest