, and started the same afternoon.

Avice, who had been little in his mind of late years, began to renew for
herself a distinct position therein. He was fully aware that since his
earlier manhood a change had come over his regard of womankind. Once the
individual had been nothing more to him than the temporary abiding-place
of the typical or ideal; now his heart showed its bent to be a growing
fidelity to the specimen, with all her pathetic flaws of detail; which
flaws, so far from sending him further, increased his tenderness. This
maturer feeling, if finer and higher, was less convenient than the old.
Ardours of passion could be felt as in youth without the recuperative
intervals which had accompanied evanescence.

The first sensation was to find that she had long ceased to live in
the little freehold cottage she had occupied of old. In answer to his
inquiries he was directed along the road to the west of the modern
castle, past the entrance on that side, and onward to the very house
that had once been his own home. There it stood as of yore, facing
up the Channel, a comfortable roomy structure, the euonymus and other
shrubs, which alone would stand in the teeth of the salt wind, living
on at about the same stature in front of it; but the paint-work much
renewed. A thriving man had resided there of late, evidently.

The widow in mourning who received him in the front parlour was, alas!
but the sorry shadow of Avice the Second. How could he have fancied
otherwise after twenty years? Yet he had been led to fancy otherwise,
almost without knowing it, by feeling himself unaltered. Indeed,
curiously enough, nearly the first words she said to him were: 'Why--you
are just the same!'

'Just the same. Yes, I am, Avice,' he answered sadly; for this inability
to ossify with the rest of his generation threw him out of proportion
with the time. Moreover, while wearing the aspect of comedy, it was of
the nature of tragedy.

'It is well to be you, sir,' she went on. 'I have had troubles to take
the bloom off me!'

'Yes; I have been sorry for you.'

She continued to regard him curiously, with humorous interest; and
he knew what was passing in her mind: that this man, to whom she had
formerly looked up as to a person far in advance of her along the lane
of life, seemed now to be a well-adjusted contemporary, the pair of them
observing the world with fairly level eyes.

He had come to her with warmth for a vision which, on reac