nd
her blanched head and face. The squire, his hands behind him, looked at
her frowning, an involuntary horror dawning on his dark countenance,
turned abruptly, and left the room.

* * * * *

Mr. Wendover worked till midnight; then, tired out, he turned to the bit
of fire to which, in spite of the oppressiveness of the weather, the
chilliness of age and nervous strain had led him to set a light. He sat
there for long, sunk in the blackest reverie. He was the only living
creature in the great library wing which spread around and above
him--the only waking creature in the whole vast pile of Murewell. The
silver lamps shone with a steady melancholy light on the chequered walls
of books. The silence was a silence that could be felt; and the gleaming
Artemis, the tortured frowning Medusa, were hardly stiller in their
frozen calm than the crouching figure of the squire.

So Elsmere was going! In a few weeks the rectory would be once more
tenanted by one of those nonentities the squire had either patronised or
scorned all his life. The park, the lanes, the room in which he sits,
will know that spare young figure, that animated voice, no more. The
outlet which had brought so much relief and stimulus to his own mental
powers is closed; the friendship on which he had unconsciously come to
depend so much is broken before it had well begun.

All sorts of strange thwarted instincts make themselves felt in the
squire. The wife he had once thought to marry, the children he might
have had, come to sit like ghosts with him beside the fire. He had
never, like Augustine, 'loved to love'; he had only loved to know. But
none of us escapes to the last the yearnings which make us men. The
squire becomes conscious that certain fibres he had thought long since
dead in him had been all the while twining themselves silently round the
disciple who had shown him in many respects such a filial consideration
and confidence. That young man might have become to him the son of his
old age, the one human being from whom, as weakness of mind and body
break him down, even his indomitable spirit might have accepted the
sweetness of human pity, the comfort of human help.

And it is his own hand which has done most to break the nascent
slowly-forming tie. He has bereft himself.

With what incredible recklessness had he been acting all these months!

It was the _levity_ of his own proceeding which stared him in the face.