ir were quite fascinated by him. Most of them had never seen a
lord before, and his curious fair beauty vaguely appealed to their
boyish hearts. Then the green carnation that he wore in his evening
coat created a great amazement in their minds. They stared upon it with
round eyes, scarcely certain that it could be a flower at all. Jimmy
Sands, the head boy, was specially magnetised by it. It appeared to
mesmerise him, and to render him unaware of outward things. Whenever it
moved his eyes moved too, and he even forgot to blush as he lost himself
in its astonishing green fascinations.

"How exquisite rose-coloured youth is," Amarinth said softly to Mrs.
Windsor, as Lord Reggie ranged the little boys before him, and prepared
to strike a chord upon the piano. "There is nothing in the world worth
having except youth, youth with its perfect sins, sins with the dew upon
them like red roses--youth with its purple passions and its wild and
wonderful tears. The world worships youth, for the world is very old and
grey and weary, and the world is becoming very respectable, like a man
who is too decrepit to sin. Ah, dear friend, let us sin while we may,
for the time will come when we shall be able to sin no more. Why, why do
the young neglect their passionate pulsating opportunities?"

He sighed, as the wind sighs through the golden strings of a harp,
musically, pathetically. These little chorister boys made him feel that
his youth had slipped from him, and left him alone with his intellect
and his epigrams. Sometimes he shivered with cold among those epigrams.
He was tired of them. He knew them so well, and then so many of them had
foreign blood in their veins, and were inclined to taunt him with being
English. Ah! youth with its simple puns and its full-blooded pleasures,
when there is no gold dust in the hair and no wrinkles about the eyes,
when the sources of an epigram, like the sources of the Nile, are
undiscoverable, and the joy of being led into sin has not lost its
pearly freshness! Ah! youth--youth! He sighed, and sighed again, for he
thought his sigh as beautiful as the face of a young Greek god!

"Sing it daintily!" cried Lord Reggie, playing the spinet-like prelude
with the soft pedal down. "Let it tinkle."

And the little rosy boys tried to let it, squeaking wrong notes with all
their might and main, and fixing their eyes upon Lord Reggie and his
carnation, rather than upon their sheets of music.

"Thy lips are li