"And so my boy has taken up his abode with our friend, the poet," wrote the colonel to me. "Do you know, I fancy it will be good for both of them. I have long felt that our poet was getting too solitary and remote—too self-centred, shall I say?

"And yet I have, too, some misgivings as to his power of controlling Tommy—although my faith in Mrs. Chundle is profound.

"Tommy, as you know, is not perhaps quite so strong as he might be, and needs careful watching—changing clothes and so on. You recollect his sudden and quite severe illness just after the Chantrey's garden party last year."

I laid down the letter and smiled, for I had wondered at the time at Tommy's survival, so appalling had been his powers of absorption.

"Poor colonel," I reflected. "He is too ridiculously wrapped up in the young rascal, for anything."

The letter ran on:

"Spare no expense as to his keep and the supplying of his reasonable wishes, but do not let him know, at any rate for the present, that he is heir to Camslove—I think he does not realise it yet—and for a while it is better he should not.

"My greeting to all the brothers. There are wars and rumours of wars in the air of the Northwest...."

I restored the letter to my pocket, and lay back in the grass, beneath the branches.

Wars and rumours of wars—well, they were far enough from here, as every twittering birdling manifested.

The colonel had always been the man of action among us, though he, of us all, had the wherewithal to be the most at ease.

One of those strange incongruities with which life abounds, and which, I reflected, must be accepted with resignation.

I had always rather prided myself upon the completeness with which I had resigned myself to my lot of idleness and obscurity, and to my own mind was a philosopher of no small merit.

I lay back under the trees full of the content of the day and the green woods and abandoned myself to meditation.

Whether it was the spirit of Spring or some latent essence of activity in my being, I do not know, but certain it is that a wave of discontent spread over me—a weariness (very unfamiliar) of myself and my cheap philosophy.

I sat up, wondering at the change and its suddenness, groping in my mind for a solution to the problem.

Could it be that my rule of life was based on a fallacy?

Surely not. Suddenly I thought of Tommy and took a deep breath of the sweet woodland air, for I had found what I had wanted.

Resignation—it was a sacrilege to use the word on such a day.

Yes, I thought, there is no doubt that the instinctive philosophy of boyhood is the true rule of life, as indeed one ought to have suspected long ago.

To enjoy the present with all the capacity of every sense, to regard the past with comparative indifference, since it is irrevocable, and the future with a healthy abandonment, since it is unknown, and to leave the sorrows of introspection to those who know no better—avaunt with your resignation. And even as I said it I saw the reeds by the pool quiver and a pair of brown eyes twinkle joyously at me from their midst.

"Hello, Tommy!" I cried.

He emerged, clad only in an inconspicuous triangular garment about his waist.

"I've been watching you ever so long," he said triumphantly.

"Been bathing?" I asked.

"Rather. It's jolly fine and not a bit cold. I say, you should have seen the old boy potting rats."

"The poet?" I murmured in amaze.

Tommy nodded.

"He is getting quite a good shot," he said. "He was doing awful well till the vicar saw him about an hour ago—an' then he wouldn't go on any more."

"I should think not," said I. "The humanitarian, the naturalist, the anti-vivisectionist, the anti-destructionist—it passes comprehension."

Tommy took a header and came up on to the sunny bank beside me, where he stood a moment with glowing cheeks and lithe shining limbs.

"This is ripping," he said—every letter an italic. "This is just ab-solutely ripping."

I laughed at his enthusiasm, and, as I laughed, shared it—oh the wine of it, of youth and health and spring—was I talking about resignation just now?—surely not.

Tommy squatted down beside me on his bare haunches, with his hands clasped over his knees.

"I have heard from your father to-day," I said.

Tommy grunted, and threw a stick at an early butterfly.

He was always most uncommunicative where he felt most, so I waited with discretion.

"All right?" he queried, presently, in a nonchalant voice.

I nodded.

"He says he's afraid you're not very strong."

Tommy stared, then he looked a little frightened.

"I—of course I'm not very strong, you know," he said thoughtfully, casting a glance down his sturdy young arms. "But I can lick young Collins, an' he weighs seven pounds more than me, an' I can pull up on the bar at gym—"

I hastened to reassure him.

"He referred to your attack last summer, you know, after the Chantrey affair."

Tommy grinned expansively.

"I expect the pater didn't know what it was," he said.

"But I did."

"You—you never told him?" in an anxious voice.

"No."

Tommy sighed.

"The pater does hate a chap being greedy, you see, and—those strawbobs were so awfully good. I couldn't help it—an' father thought I'd got a—intestinal chill, I think he said."

Tommy gave a passing moment to remembrance. Then he jumped up.

"I'm quite dry again," he said, looking down at me. "So I guess I'll hop in."

The remark appeared to me slightly inconsequent, but Tommy laughed and drew back under the shade of the tree. Then came a rush of white limbs, and he was bobbing up again in the middle of the sunny pool.

"Well dived," I cried, encouragingly, but he looked a little contemptuous.

"It was a jolly bad one," he said, "a beastly...." Delicacy forbids me to record the exact word he used, but it ended with "flopper."

He crawled out again, and shook the water from his eyes.

"I say, won't you come in?" he cried eagerly. "It's simply grand in there, and a gravel bottom."

But I am a man of careful habits, and sober ways, with a reputation for some stateliness both of behaviour and bearing, and I shook my head.

Tommy urged again.

"It's not as if you were an old man," he cried.

The thought had not occurred to me. Age, in our little fraternity had been a matter of but small interest. We had pursued the same routine of gentle exercise, and dignified diversion, quiet jest and cultured occupation, for so many years now, that we had seemed to be alike removed from youth and age, in a quiet, unalterable, back-water of life, quite apart from the hurrying stream of contemporary event.

No, I was certainly not an old man, unless a well preserved specimen of forty-eight, with simple habits, can so be styled.

Tommy stood expectant before me, his bare feet well apart, a very embodiment of young health, and, as I looked at him, a horrid doubt crept into my mind—had I—could I possibly have become that most objectionable of persons, a man in a groove?

"Do come," said Tommy.

"Don't be a fool," said Wisdom (only I was not quite sure of the speaker).

I looked round at the meadow, and the wood, and saw that we were alone.

"It is April," I said weakly.

"But it's quite warm—it is really." And so I fell.

To you, O reader, it may seem a quite small matter, but to me it was far from being so, for as I climbed the bank from each glad plunge I felt in my blood a strange desire growing to do something, to achieve, to surmount.

Such emotions I had not known for years—not since—a time, when, on a day, I had set myself to love seclusion and inactivity, and to live in study and retrospect, on the small means that were mine.

Ah, Tommy, never think that if any one desire be unfulfilled, life has therefore lost its sweetness, and its mission, and its responsibility!

"Cave," hissed Tommy, from the water.

I held my breath, and sure enough there were voices along the path, and close at hand, too.

I made a desperate leap, and entered the water with a quite colossal flop, for I am moderately stout.

And, even so, I had barely time to wade in up to my neck, before two figures, those of a little girl and a young lady, tripped into sight.

"Why," said the little girl, "there's old Mr. Mathews and a little boy in the pool. How funny."

The young lady—it was Lady Chantrey's governess—hesitated a moment and then courageously held on.

"Yes," I heard her say. "It certainly is peculiar, quite peculiar."

Whether she referred to me, or the situation, or an affair of previous conversation, I did not know.

I did not, indeed, much care, for surely this was enough that I, a philosopher of dignity, a bachelor of some importance, at any rate in Camslove, should have been seen in a small pool, with only a draggled head above the surface, by Lady Chantrey's daughter, and her governess.

I crept out, and had perforce to sit in the sun to dry, praying earnestly lest any other members of the surrounding families should come that way.

Tommy was in high spirits.

"It's done you lots of good," he said.

I glared at him.

"What do you mean?" I asked coldly, for his words seemed suggestive.

"You look so jolly fresh," he observed, dressing himself leisurely.

I felt that it was time I returned, and invited Tommy to partake of lunch with me. He declined, however, as he had thoughtfully provided himself with food, before starting out with the poet.

"So long," he said.

As I glanced up the brook, before returning homewards, I saw a sailor hat, navigating a small rapid.

"But I have no walking-stick," I reflected. "And it is in the middle of the stream."