t?" asked Henry, realising
that this was the Jacobite method.

"Not just yet," said the little man, reassuringly. So Henry was
enrolled.

* * * * *

And so it went on till past midnight, when Henry at last escaped, to
talk it all over with the stars. The evening had naturally puzzled him,
as a man will always be puzzled who has developed under the influence of
the main tendencies of his generation, and who finds himself suddenly in
a backwater of fanciful reaction. Henry, in his simple way, was a
thinker and a radical, and he had nourished himself on the great
main-road masters of English literature. He had followed the lead of
modern philosophers and scientists, and had arrived at a mystical
agnosticism,--the first step of which was to banish the dogmas of the
church as old wives' tales. He considered that he had inherited the
hard-won gains of the rationalists. But he came to London and found
young men feebly playing with the fire of that Romanism which he
regarded as at once the most childish and the most dangerous of all
intellectual obsessions. In an age of great biologists and electricians,
he came upon children prettily talking about fairies and the
philosopher's stone. In one of the greatest ages of English poetry, he
came to London to find young English poets falling on their knees to the
metrical mathematicians of France. In the great age of democracy, a fool
had come and asked him if he were not a supporter of the house of
Stuart, a Jacobite of charades. But only once had he heard the name of
Milton; it was the learned boy of fifteen who had quoted him,--a
lifelong debt of gratitude; and never once had he heard the voice of
simple human feeling, nor heard one speak of beauty, simply,
passionately, with his heart in his mouth; nor of love with his heart
upon his sleeve. Much cleverness, much learning, much charm, there had
been, but he had missed the generous human impulse. No one seemed to be
doing anything because he must. These were pleasant eddies, dainty with
lilies and curiously starred water-grasses, but the great warm stream of
English literature was not flowing here.

As he neared his hotel, he thought of his morning visit to Goldsmith's
tomb, and ten-fold he repented the little half-sneer with which he had
bought the flowers. In a boyish impulse, he rang the Temple bell, and
found his way again to the lonely corner. His flowers were lying there
in the moonlight, an