It’s a form of window shopping, I guess. I wasn’t going to take anything of Candlemas’s-I’m a professional burglar, not a kleptomaniac-but I kept my eyes open just the same. I spotted a Chinese snuff bottle, skillfully carved from rose quartz, and a group of ivory netsuke, including a fat beaver whose tail seemed to have gone the way of all flesh.

I admired the carpet, and Candlemas showed me around and pointed out a couple of others, including a Tibetan tiger rug, an old one. I said I was sorry to be late and he said I was right on time, that it was the third member of our party who was late, but that he should be arriving at any moment. I turned down a drink and accepted a cup of coffee, and was not surprised to find it rich and full-bodied and freshly brewed. He talked a little about Winthrop Mackworth Praed, and speculated on what he might have done if tuberculosis hadn’t shortened his life. He’d had a seat in the House of Commons; would he have gone further in politics and let poetry take a back seat? Or might he have grown disillusioned with political life, quit writing the topical partisan doggerel he’d turned to toward the end, and gone on to produce mature work to put his early verses in the shade?

We were batting that one around when the doorbell rang, and Candlemas crossed the room to buzz in the new arrival. We waited for him at the top of the stairs, and he turned out to be a thickset older fellow with a pug nose and a broad face. He had a drinker’s complexion and a smoker’s cough, but you could have been deaf and blind and still known how he got through the days. Unless you had a bad cold, say, and couldn’t smell the booze on his breath and the smoke in his hair and clothes. Even so you might have guessed from the way he took the stairs, pausing on the landings to catch his breath, and still having to take his time on the final flight of steps.