He had often told the girl whom he had lured to love him that he was poor, and she had believed him.

He had told her once that he was wicked, and she had laughed at him and answered that wicked people were always very old and very ugly.

What a laugh she had!--just like a thrush singing.

And how pretty she had been in her cotton dresses and her large hats! She knew nothing, but she had everything that he had lost.
When he reached home, he found his servant waiting up for him.

He sent him to bed, and threw himself down on the sofa in the library, and began to think over some of the things that Lord Henry had said to him.
Was it really true that one could never change?
He felt a wild longing for the unstained purity of his boyhood--his rose-white boyhood, as Lord Henry had once called it.