"No! I have a sufficiency of this world's goods."
"The critics have been abusing your last poems, perhaps?"
"Ah! then there's only one reason left. You are in love?"
"True, oh king," said Roger, drawing hard at his pipe, "I am in love."
"Tell me all about it," said Fanks, curling himself up luxuriously in his chair. "I adore love confidences. When you were a small nuisance at school, you told me all your troubles, and I consoled you. Do so now, and--"
"No! no!" cried Axton, suddenly, "you can't console me now. No one can do that."
"That remains to be seen," said Fanks, smiling. "Come now, Roger, tell me your trouble. Though we have been parted for ten years, I have often thought of my school friend. Unburden your heart to me; it will relieve your mind if it does nothing else."
Thus adjured, Roger brightened up, and settling himself comfortably in his chair, put his feet against the mantelpiece, blew a thick cloud of smoke, and began to tell his story.
"I'm afraid my story hasn't the merit of novelty," he said, candidly. "After you left school I remained, as you know. Then my parents died--within a few months of each other--and I found myself a well-provided orphan. When I say well-provided, I mean that I had an income of three hundred a year, and one can always live comfortably on six pounds a week, if not extravagant. Being thus independent of the world, the flesh, and the devil, meaning thereby the employer, the publisher, and the critic, I went in for writing poetry. It didn't pay, of course, this being the age of sensational literature; but verse manufacturing amused me, and I wandered all over England and the Continent in a desultory sort of way. A kind of grand tour in the poet line, midway between the poverty of Goldsmith and the luxury of Byron. I published a book of poems and the critics abused it--found plenty of faults and no virtues. Well, I was wrathful at this new massacre of the literary innocents and fled to the land of Egypt--in plain English I went down to Ventnor in the Isle of Wight. There I met Her--"
"With a large 'H,' of course," murmured Mr. Fanks, sympathetically.
"Ah! May I ask where you met her for the first time?"
"Oh, in some other place," said Roger, evasively; "but that's got nothing to do with the subject. The first time we met--well, it was the first time."