CHAPTER XX.
FANNY MILLINGER ONCE MORE .-- LOVE .-- WOMAN .-- BOOKS .-- A HUNDRED TOPICS TOUCHED ON THE SURFACE .-- GODOLPHIN'S STATE OF MIND MORE MINUTELY EXAMINED .-- THE DINNER AT SAVILLE'S.
Godolphin went to see and converse with Fanny Millinger.
She was still unmarried, and still the fashion.

There was a sort of allegory of real life, in the manner in which, at certain epochs, our Idealist was brought into contact with the fair actress of ideal creations.

There was, in short, something of a moral in the way these two streams of existence--the one belonging to the Actual, the other to the Imaginary--flowed on, crossing each other at stated times.

Which was the more really imaginative--the life of the stage, or that of the world's stage?
The gay Fanny was rejoiced to welcome back again her early lover.

She ran on, talking of a thousand topics, without remarking the absent mind and musing eye of Godolphin, till he himself stopped her somewhat abruptly:-- "Well, Fanny, well, and what do you know of Saville?
You have grown intimate with him, eh?
We shall meet at his house this evening." "Oh, yes, he is a charming person in his little way; and the only man who allows me to be a friend without dreaming of becoming a lover.