er didn't I think of it before!" exclaimed Aunt Tipping,
presently. "I've got the very gentleman to help you with your writing."

"Indeed," said Henry, somewhat sceptical.

"Yes; he's down there in the back parlour. They say he's a great
writer," continued Aunt Tipping; "but he's not very well the last day or
two, and doesn't see anybody. To tell the truth, poor gentleman," she
confided, lowering her voice, "he's just a little too fond of his glass.
But he's as good and kind a gentleman as ever stepped, and always
regular with his rent every Monday morning."

There was usually something mysterious about Aunt Tipping's lodgers. At
their best, she had known them as elaborately wronged bye-products of
aristocracy. Many of them were lawful expectants of illegally delayed
fortunes, and at the very least they always drank romantically.

Thus it was that to the somewhat amused surprise of his family, Henry
came to take up his abode for a while with Aunt Tipping, and that his
books and the cast of Dante, and the sketch of the young Dante done in
sepia by Myrtilla Williamson's own fair hand, came to find themselves in
the incongruous environment of Tichborne Street.

CHAPTER XXXII

THE LITERARY GENTLEMAN IN THE BACK PARLOUR

Aunt Tipping proved not so ludicrously out of it after all in regard to
the literary gentleman in the back parlour. Henry had hardly known what
to expect; but certainly he had pictured no one so interesting as Ashton
Gerard proved to be. For a dark den smelling strongly of whisky and
water, and some slovenly creature of the under-world crouched in a dirty
armchair over the fire, he found instead a pleasant little room, very
neatly kept, with books, two or three good pictures, and general
evidence of cultivated tastes; and on Mr. Gerard's refined sad face,
which, being shaven, and surmounted by a tuft of vigorous curly hair,
once black but now curiously splashed with vivid flakes of white,
retained something of boyish beauty even at forty, you looked in vain
for the marks of one who was in the grip of an imperious vice. Only by
the marked dimness and weariness of his blue eyes, which gave the face a
rather helpless, dreamy expression, might the experienced observer have
understood. So to speak, the ocular will had gone out of them; they no
longer grasped the visible, but glided listlessly over it; nor did they
seem to be looking on things invisible. They were the eyes of
the drowned.

Mr. Ger