er of an hour Mr. Spicer could talk of nothing else.

'This has completed my cure!' he kept repeating. 'The work was composed
under my roof, my own roof, sir! Did I not tell you to take heart?'

'And where are you going to live?' asked Goldthorpe presently. 'You can't
go back to the old house.'

'Alas! no, sir. All my life I have dreamt of the joy of owning a house. You
know how the dream was realised, Mr. Goldthorpe, and you see what has come
of it at last. Probably it is a chastisement for overweening desires, sir.
I should have remembered my position, and kept my wishes within bounds.
But, Mr. Goldthorpe, I shall continue to cultivate the garden, sir. I shall
put in spring lettuces, and radishes, and mustard and cress. The property
is mine till midsummer day. You shall eat a lettuce of my growing, Mr.
Goldthorpe; I am bent on that. And how I grieve that you were not with me
at the time of the artichokes--just at the moment when they were touched by
the first frost!'

'Ah! They were really good, Mr. Spicer?'

'Sir, they seemed good to _me_, very good. Just at the moment of the first
frost!'

A CAPITALIST

Among the men whom I saw occasionally at the little club in Mortimer
Street,--and nowhere else,--was one who drew my attention before I had
learnt his name or knew anything about him. Of middle age, in the fullness
of health and vigour, but slenderly built; his face rather shrewd than
intellectual, interesting rather than pleasing; always dressed as the
season's mode dictated, but without dandyism; assuredly he belonged to the
money-spending, and probably to the money-getting, world. At first sight of
him I remember resenting his cap-a-pie perfection; it struck me as bad
form--here in Mortimer Street, among fellows of the pen and the palette.

'Oh,' said Harvey Munden, 'he's afraid of being taken for one of us. He
buys pictures. Not a bad sort, I believe, if it weren't for his
snobbishness.'

'His name?'

'Ireton. Has a house in Fitzjohn Avenue, and a high-trotting wife.'

Six months later I recalled this description of Mrs. Ireton. She was the
talk of the town, the heroine of the newest divorce case. By that time I
had got to know her husband; perhaps once a fortnight we chatted at the
club, and I found him an agreeable acquaintance. Before the Divorce Court
flashed a light of scandal upon his home, I felt that there was more in him
than could be discovered in casual gossip; I wished to know him