many hours, to let it in.
Unfailing comrades--London plane-trees!

He had not dared hope that Sylvia would be asleep. It was merciful that
she was, whichever way the issue went--that issue so cruel. Her face was
turned towards the fire, and one hand rested beneath her cheek. So she
often slept. Even when life seemed all at sea, its landmarks lost, one
still did what was customary. Poor tender-hearted thing--she had not
slept since he told her, forty-eight hours, that seemed such years, ago!
With her flaxen hair, and her touching candour, even in sleep, she looked
like a girl lying there, not so greatly changed from what she had been
that summer of Cicely's marriage down at Hayle. Her face had not grown
old in all those twenty-eight years. There had been till now no special
reason why it should. Thought, strong feeling, suffering, those were
what changed faces; Sylvia had never thought very deeply, never suffered
much, till now. And was it for him, who had been careful of her--very
careful on the whole, despite man's selfishness, despite her never having
understood the depths of him--was it for him of all people to hurt her
so, to stamp her face with sorrow, perhaps destroy her utterly?

He crept a little farther in and sat down in the arm-chair beyond the
fire. What memories a fire gathered into it, with its flaky ashes, its
little leaf-like flames, and that quiet glow and flicker! What tale of
passions! How like to a fire was a man's heart! The first young fitful
leapings, the sudden, fierce, mastering heat, the long, steady sober
burning, and then--that last flaming-up, that clutch back at its own
vanished youth, the final eager flight of flame, before the ashes
wintered it to nothing! Visions and memories he saw down in the fire, as
only can be seen when a man's heart, by the agony of long struggle, has
been stripped of skin, and quivers at every touch. Love! A strange
haphazard thing was love--so spun between ecstacy and torture! A thing
insidious, irresponsible, desperate. A flying sweetness, more poignant
than anything on earth, more dark in origin and destiny. A thing without
reason or coherence. A man's love-life--what say had he in the ebb and
flow of it? No more than in the flights of autumn birds, swooping down,
alighting here and there, passing on. The loves one left behind--even in
a life by no means vagabond in love, as men's lives went! The love that
thought the Tyrol skies would fal