into
the east room and took up his brown book.

"Oh!" said Lydia.

That was all he was to hear from her, and he was glad. He hadn't any
assurance within him of the force to assuage an indignation he
understood though he couldn't feel it. That was another of the levelling
powers of age. You couldn't key your emotions up to the point where they
might shatter something or perhaps really do some good. It wasn't only
that you hadn't the blood and breath. It also didn't seem worth while.
He was angry, in a measure, with the hidden woman he couldn't get at to
bid her come and help him fight the battle that was hers even more
indubitably than his; yet he was conscious that behind her defences was
another world of passion and emotion and terribly strong desires, as
valid as his own. She had her side. He didn't know what it was. He
wanted really to avoid knowing, lest it weaken him through its appeal
for a new sympathy; but he knew the side was there. This, he said to
himself, with a half smile, was probably known as tolerance. It seemed
to him old age.

So, from their benign choice, he had really nothing to say to Lydia or
Anne. In the late afternoon Anne asked him to go to walk and show her
the town, and he put her off. He was conscious of having drowsed away in
his chair, into one of those intervals he found so inevitable, and that
were, at the same time, so irritatingly foreign to his previous habits
of life. He did not drop his pursuits definitely to take a nap. The nap
seemed to take him, even when he was on the margin of some lake or river
where he thought himself well occupied in seeing the moving to and fro
of boats, for business and pleasure, just as his own boat had gallantly
cut invisible paths on the air and water in those earlier years. The nap
would steal upon him like an amiable yet inexorable joker, and throw a
cloudy veil over his brain and eyes, and he would sink into a gulf he
had not perceived. It lay at his feet, and something was always ready to
push him into it. He thought sometimes, wondering at the inevitableness
of it, that one day the veil would prove a pall.

But after their twilight supper, he felt more in key with the tangible
world, and announced himself as ready to set forth. Lydia refused to go.
She had something to do, she said; but she walked down the driveway with
them, and waited until they had gone a rod or two along the street. The
colonel turned away from Esther's house, as Lydia knew