taut thirty, I feel an alder-elde of accumulated centuries upon
me--when I was young, the dream of my life was Poesy. Perhaps I
inherited the fatal love of it from my mother--she was a Greek-and
she had a subtle music in her that nothing could quell, not even
my father's English coldness. She named me Theos, little guessing
what a dreary sarcasm that name would prove! It was well, I think,
that she died early."

"Well for her, but perhaps not so well for you," said Heliobas
with a keen, kindly glance at him.

Alwyn sighed. "Nay, well, for us both,--for I should have chafed
at her loving restraint, and she would unquestionably have been
disappointed in me. My father was a conscientious, methodical
business man, who spent all his days up to almost the last moment
of his life in amassing money, though it never gave him any joy so
far as I could see, and when at his death I became sole possessor
of his hardly-earned fortune, I felt far more sorrow than
satisfaction. I wished he had spent his gold on himself and left
me poor, for it seemed to me I had need of nothing save the little
I earned by my pen--I was content to live an anchorite and dine
off a crust for the sake of the divine Muse I worshipped. Fate,
however, willed it otherwise,--and though I scarcely cared for the
wealth I inherited, it gave me at least one blessing--that of
perfect independence. I was free to follow my own chosen vocation,
and for a brief wondering while I deemed myself happy, ... happy
as Keats must have been when the fragment of 'Hyperion' broke
from his frail life as thunder breaks from a summer-cloud. I was
as a monarch swaying a sceptre that commanded both earth and
heaven; a kingdom was mine-a kingdom of golden ether, peopled with