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
would meet the men who had 'arrived'--actors, painters, musicians,
authors, and now and then a politician--who thus recognised him as
more or less one of themselves. Everybody liked him; everybody said,
'He is splendidly gifted; he will go far.' A few of us already
addressed him, half-playfully perhaps, as _cher maitre_.

He was three or four years older than I--eight- or nine-and-twenty to
my twenty-five--and I was still in the schools; but for all that we
were great chums. Quite apart from his special talent, he was a
remarkable man--amusing in talk, good-looking, generous, affectionate.
He had read; he had travelled; he had hob-and-nobbed with all sorts
and conditions of people. He had wit, imagination, humour, and a voice
that made whatever he said a cordial to the ear. For myself, I admired
him, enjoyed him, loved him, with equal fervour; he had all of my
hero-worship, and the lion's share of my friendship; perhaps I was
vain as well as glad to be distinguished by his intimacy. We used to
spend two or three evenings a week together, at his place or at mine,
or over the table of a c