But I shall never see him again.’

He squeezed the trembling, kindly old hand. ‘I bet, Miss Sinnet,’ he
said earnestly, ‘even your having _thought_ kindly of the poor beggar
eased his mind—whoever he may have been. I assure you, assure you of
that.’

‘Ay, but I did more than _think_,’ replied the old lady with a chuckle
that might have seemed even a little derisive if it had not been so
profoundly magnanimous. He watched the old black fly roll slowly off, and still smiling at Miss
Sinnet’s inscrutable finesse went back into the house. ‘And now, my
friend,’ he said, addressing peacefully the thronging darkness, ‘the
time’s nearly up for me to go too.’

He had made up his mind. Or, rather, it seemed as if in the unregarded
silences of this last long talk his mind had made up itself. Only among
impossibilities had he the shadow of a choice. In this old haunted
house, amid this shallow turmoil no practicable clue could show itself
of a way out. He would go away for a while. He left the door ajar behind him for the moments still left, and stood
for a while thinking. Then, lamp in hand, he descended into the
breakfast-room for pen, ink, and paper. He sat for some time in that
underground calm, nibbling his pen like a harassed and self-conscious
schoolboy. At last he began:

‘MY DEAR SHEILA,—I must tell you, to begin with, that the _change_ has
now all passed away. I am—as near as man can be—completely myself
again. And next: that I overheard all that was said to-night in the
dining-room. ‘I’m sorry for listening; but it’s no good going over all that now. Here I am, and, as you said, for Alice’s sake we must make the best of
it. I am going away for a while, to get, if I can, a chance to quiet
down. I suppose every one comes sooner or later to a time in life when
there is nothing else to be done but just shut one’s eyes and blunder
on. And that’s all I can do now—blunder on....’

He paused, and suddenly, at the echo of the words in his mind, a
revulsion of feeling—shame and hatred of himself surged up, and he tore
his letter into tiny pieces. Once more he began, ‘my dear Sheila,’
dropped his pen, sat on for a long time, cold and inert, harbouring
almost unendurably a pitiful, hopeless longing.... He would write to
Grisel another day. He leant back in his chair, his fingers pressed against his eyelids. And clearer than those which myriad-hued reality can ever present,
pictures of the imagination swam up before his eyes. It seemed, indeed,
that even now some ghost, some revenant of himself was sitting there,
in the old green churchyard, roofed only with a thousand thousand
stars. The breath of darkness stirred softly on his cheek. Some little
scampering shape slipped by. A bird on high cried weirdly, solemnly,
over the globe. He shuddered faintly, and looked out again into the
small lamplit room. Here, too, was quite as inexplicable a coming and going. A fly was
walking on the table beneath his eyes, with the uneasy gait of one that
has outlived his hour and most of his companions. Mice were scampering
and shrieking in the empty kitchen. And all about him, in the viewless
air, the phantoms of another life passed by, unmindful of his
motionless body. He fell into a lethargy of the senses, and only
gradually became aware after a while of the strange long-drawn sigh of
rain at the window. He rose and opened it. The night air flowed in,
chilled with its waters and faintly fragrant of the dust. It soothed
away all thought for a while. He turned back to his chair. He would
wait until the rain had lulled before starting....

A little before midnight the door was softly, and with extreme care,
pushed open, and Mr Bethany’s old face, with an intense and sharpened
scrutiny, looked in on the lamplit room. And as if still intent on the
least sound within the empty walls around him, he came near, and
stooping across the table, stared through his spectacles at the
sidelong face of his friend, so still, with hands so lightly laid on
the arms of his chair that the old man had need to watch closely to
detect in his heavy slumber the slow measured rise and fall of his
breast. He turned wearily away muttering a little, between an immeasurable
relief and a now almost intolerable medley of vexations. What _was_
this monstrous web of Craik’s? What _had_ the creature been nodding and
ducketing about?—those whisperings, that tattling? And what in the end,
when you were old and sour and out-strategied, what was the end to be
of this urgent dream called Life? He sat quietly down and drew his
hands over his face, pushed his lean knotted fingers up under his
spectacles, then sat blinking—and softly slowly deciphered the solitary
‘My dear Sheila’ on Lawford’s note-paper. ‘H’m,’ he muttered, and
looked up again at the dark still eyelids that in the strange torpor of
sleep might yet be dimly conveying to the dreaming brain behind them
some hint of his presence. ‘I wish to goodness, you wonderful old
creature,’ he muttered, wagging his head, ‘I wish to goodness you’d
wake up.’

For some time he sat on, listening to the still soft downpour on the
fading leaves. ‘They don’t come to _me_,’ he said softly again; with a
tiny smile on his old face. ‘It’s that old medieval Craik: with a face
like a last year’s rookery!’ And again he sat, with head a little
sidelong, listening now to the infinitesimal sounds of life without,
now to the thoughts within, and ever and again he gazed steadfastly on
Lawford. At last it seemed in the haunted quietness other thoughts came to him. A cloud, as it were of youth, drew over the wrinkled skin, composed the
birdlike keenness; his head nodded. Once, like Lawford in the darkness
at Widderstone, he glanced up sharply across the lamplight at his
phantasmagorical shadowy companion, heard the steady surge of
multitudinous rain-drops, like the roar of Time’s winged chariot
hurrying near; then he too, with spectacles awry, bobbed on in his
chair, a weary old sentinel on the outskirts of his friend’s denuded