‘But what?’

‘But—­well, I much prefer roses.  Indeed I do.’

‘Rose of the World,’ I continued with sentiment, ’draw in your thorns.  I cannot bear them.’

‘Ah!’ she answered eagerly, ’that is just it.  The nightingale that is worthy of the rose will not only bear, but positively love, her thorns.  It is for that reason she wears them.  The thorns of the rose properly understood are but the tests of the nightingale.  The nightingale that is frightened of the thorns is not worthy of the rose—­of that you may be sure....’

‘I am not frightened of the thorns,’ I managed to interject.

‘Sing then once more,’ she cried, ‘the Song of the Nightingale.’

And it was thus I sang:—­

  O Rose of the World, a nightingale,
    A Bird of the World, am I,
  I have loved all the world and sung all the world,
    But I come to your side to die.

  Tired of the world, as the world of me,
    I plead for your quiet breast,
  I have loved all the world and sung all the world—­
    But—­where is the nightingale’s nest?

  In a hundred gardens I sung the rose,
    Rose of the World, I confess—­
  But for every rose I have sung before
    I love you the more, not less.

  Perfect it grew by each rose that died,
    Each rose that has died for you,
  The song that I sing—­yea, ’tis no new song,
    It is tried—­and so it is true.

  Petal or thorn, yea!  I have no care,
    So that I here abide;
  Pierce me, my love, or kiss me, my love,
    But keep me close to your side.

  I know not your kiss from your scorn, my love,
    Your breast from your thorn, my rose,
  And if you must kill me, well, kill me, my love! 
    But—­say ’twas the death I chose.

‘Is it true?’ asked the Rose.

‘As I am a nightingale,’ I replied; and as we bade each other good-night, I whispered: 

‘When may I expect the Answer of the Rose?’

ABOUT THE SECURITIES

When I say that my friend Matthew lay dying, I want you so far as possible to dissociate the statement from any conventional, and certainly from any pictorial, conceptions of death which you may have acquired.  Death sometimes shows himself one of those impersonal artists who conceal their art, and, unless you had been told, you could hardly have guessed that Matthew was dying, dying indeed sixty miles an hour, dying of consumption, dying because some one else had died four years before, dying too of debt.

Connoisseurs, of course, would have understood; at a glance would have named the sculptor who was silently chiselling those noble hollows in the finely modelled face,—­that Pygmalion who turns all flesh to stone,—­at a glance would have named the painter who was cunningly weighting the brows with darkness that the eyes might shine the more with an unaccustomed light.  Matthew and I had long been students of the strange wandering artist, had begun by hating his art (it is ever so with an art unfamiliar to us), and had ended by loving it.