eyes, no lust ever crawled in the lines about his mouth.  His smooth cheeks never flushed with beaconing desire, nor was his white forehead pencilled with the shadowy writing that is a pale warning to the libertine.  And yet his speech about the spring that night, as they leaned out over Victoria Street, had evidently not been a mere reckless rhapsody.  It had held a meaning and was remembered.  In Valentine there seemed to be flowering a number of faint-hued wants, such wants as had never flowered from his nature before.  The fig-tree that had seemed so exquisitely barren began to put forth leaves, and when the warm showers sang to it, it sang in tremulous reply.

And the spring grew in London.

Never before had Julian been so conscious of the growth of the year as now.  The spring stirred inside him, as if he were indeed the Mother Earth.  Tumults of nature shook him.  With the bursting of the crocus, the pointing of its spear of gold to the sun, a life gathered itself together within him, a life that held, too, a golden shaft within its colour-stained cup.  And the bland scent of the innumerable troops of hyacinths in Hyde Park was a language to him as he strolled in the sun towards the Row.  Scents speak to the young of the future as they speak to the old of the past; to the one with an indefinite excitement, to the other with a vague regret.  And especially when he was in the company of Valentine did Julian become intensely alive to the march of the earth towards summer, and feel that he was in step with it, dragooned by the same music.  He began to learn, so he believed, what Valentine had called the lesson of his strength, and of all the strength of the spring.  His wild blood leaped in his veins, and the world was walking with him to a large prospect, as yet fancifully tricked out in mists and crowned with clouds.

The spring brought to Valentine an abounding health such as he had never known before, a physical glory which, without actually changing him, gave to him a certain novelty of aspect which Julian felt without actually seeing.  One day, when they were out riding together in the Park, he said: 

“How extraordinarily strong you look to-day, Val.”

Valentine spurred his horse into a short gallop.

“I feel robust,” he said.  “I think it is my mind working on my body.  I have attained to a more healthy outlook on things, to a saner conception of life.  For years you have been learning from me, Julian.  Now I think the positions are reversed.  I am learning from you.”

Julian pressed his knees against his horse’s sides with an iron grip, feeling the spirited animal’s spirited life between them.  They were now on a level with the Serpentine and riding parallel to it.  A few vigorous and determined bathers swam gaily in the pale warmth of the morning sun.  Two boys raced along the grassy bank to dry themselves, whooping with exultation, and leaping as they ran.  A man in a broad boat, ready to save life, exchanged loud jokes with the swimmers.  On a seat two filthy loafers watched the scene with vacant eyes.  They had slept in the Park all night, and their ragged clothes were drenched with dew.