When Lionel returned to town a little after ten o’clock that night he walked along to Mangan’s rooms in Victoria Street, and found his friend sitting in front of the fire alone.

“Glad you’ve looked in, Linn.”

“Well, you don’t seem to be busy, old chap; who ever saw you before without a book or a pipe?”

“I’ve been musing, and dreaming dreams, and wishing I was a poet,” said this tall, thin, languid-looking man, whose abnormally keen gray eyes were now grown a little absent.  “It’s only a fancy, you know—­perhaps something could be made of it by a fellow who could rhyme—­”

“But what is it?” Lionel interposed.

“Well,” said the other, still idly staring into the fire before him, “I think I would call it ’The Cry of the Violets’—­the violets that are sold in bunches at the head of the Haymarket at midnight.  Don’t you fancy there might be something in it—­if you think of where they come from—­the woods and copses, children playing, and all that—­and of what they’ve come to—­the gas-glare and drunken laughter and jeers.  I would make them tell their own story—­I would make them cry to Heaven for swift death and oblivion before the last degradation of being pinned on to the flaunting dress.”  And then again he said:  “No, I don’t suppose there’s any thing in it; but I’ll tell you what made me think of it.  This morning, as we were coming back from Winstead church—­you know how extraordinarily mild it has been of late, and the lane going down to the church is very well sheltered—­I found a couple of violets in at the roots of the hedge—­within a few inches of each other, indeed—­and I gave them to Miss Francie, and she put them in her prayer-book and carried them home.  I thought the violets would not object to that, if they only knew.”

“So you went down to Winstead this morning?”

“Yes.”

“And how are the old people?”

“Oh, very well.”

“And Francie?”

“Very busy—­and very happy, I think.  If she doesn’t deserve to be, who does?” he continued, rousing himself somewhat from his absent manner.  “I suppose, now, there is no absolutely faultless woman; and yet I sometimes think it would puzzle the most fastidious critic of human nature to point out any one particular in which Miss Francie could be finer than she is; I think it would.  It is not my business to find fault; I don’t want to find fault; but I have often thought over Miss Francie—­her occupations, her theories, her personal disposition, even her dress—­and I’ve wondered where the improvement was to be suggested.  You see, she might be a very good woman, and yet have no sense of humor; she might be very charitable, and also a little vainglorious about it; she might have very exalted ideas of duty, and be a trifle hard on those who did not come up to her standards; but in Miss Francie’s case these qualifications haven’t to be put in at all.  She always seems to me to be doing the right thing, and just in the right way—­with a kind of fine touch that has no namby-pambiness about it.  Oh, she can be firm, too; she can scold them well enough, those children—­when she doesn’t laugh and pat them on the shoulder the minute after.”