his
face with his hand, resumed, in faltering accents,--

"But once--but once only, did such vision of the Beautiful made Human
rise before me,--rise amidst 'golden exhalations of the dawn.' It
beggared my life in vanishing. You know only--you only--how--how--"

He bowed his head, and the tears forced themselves through his clenched
fingers.

"So long ago!" said Audley, sharing his friend's emotion. "Years so long
and so weary, yet still thus tenacious of a mere boyish memory!"

"Away with it, then!" cried Harley, springing to his feet, and with
a laugh of strange merriment. "Your carriage still waits: set me home
before you go to the House."

Then laying his hand lightly on his friend's shoulder, he said, "Is it
for you, Audley Egerton, to speak sneeringly of boyish memories? What
else is it that binds us together? What else warms my heart when I meet
you? What else draws your thoughts from blue-books and beer-bills to
waste them on a vagrant like me? Shake hands. Oh, friend of my boyhood!
recollect the oars that we plied and the bats that we wielded in the old
time, or the murmured talk on the moss-grown bank, as we sat together,
building in the summer air castles mightier than Windsor. Ah, they are
strong ties, those boyish memories believe me! I remember, as if it
were yesterday, my translation of that lovely passage in Persius,
beginning--let me see--ah!

"'Quum primum pavido custos mihi purpura cernet,'--

that passage on friendship which gushes out so livingly from the stern
heart of the satirist. And when old--complimented me on my verses, my
eye sought yours. Verily, I now say as then,--

"'Nescio quod, certe est quod me tibi temperet astrum.'"

["What was the star I know not, but certainly some star
it was that attuned me unto thee."]

Audley turned away his head as he returned the grasp of his friend's
hand; and while Harley, with his light elastic footstep, descended the
stairs, Egerton lingered behind, and there was no trace of the worldly
man upon his countenance when he took his place in the carriage by his
companion's side.

Two hours afterwards, weary cries of "Question, question!" "Divide,
divide!" sank into reluctant silence as Audley Egerton rose to conclude
the debate,--the man of men to speak late at night, and to impatient
benches: a man who would be heard; whom a Bedlam broke loose would not
have roared down; with a voice clear and sound as a bell, and a form as