Yes, it had begun within him over a year ago, with a queer unhappy
restlessness, a feeling that life was slipping, ebbing away within reach
of him, and his arms never stretched out to arrest it. It had begun with
a sort of long craving, stilled only when he was working hard--a craving
for he knew not what, an ache which was worst whenever the wind was soft.

They said that about forty-five was a perilous age for a man--especially
for an artist. All the autumn of last year he had felt this vague misery
rather badly. It had left him alone most of December and January, while
he was working so hard at his group of lions; but the moment that was
finished it had gripped him hard again. In those last days of January he
well remembered wandering about in the parks day after day, trying to get
away from it. Mild weather, with a scent in the wind! With what avidity
he had watched children playing, the premature buds on the bushes,
anything, everything young--with what an ache, too, he had been conscious
of innumerable lives being lived round him, and loves loved, and he
outside, unable to know, to grasp, to gather them; and all the time the
sands of his hourglass running out! A most absurd and unreasonable
feeling for a man with everything he wanted, with work that he loved,
quite enough money, and a wife so good as Sylvia--a feeling that no
Englishman of forty-six, in excellent health, ought for a moment to have
been troubled with. A feeling such as, indeed, no Englishman ever
admitted having--so that there was not even, as yet, a Society for its
suppression. For what was this disquiet feeling, but the sense that he
had had his day, would never again know the stir and fearful joy of
falling in love, but only just hanker after what was past and gone!
Could anything be more reprehensible in a married man?

It was--yes--the last day of January, when, returning from one of those
restless rambles in Hyde Park, he met Dromore. Queer to recognize a man
hardly seen since school-days. Yet unmistakably, Johnny Dromore,
sauntering along the rails of Piccadilly on the Green Park side, with
that slightly rolling gait of his thin, horseman's legs, his dandified
hat a little to one side, those strange, chaffing, goggling eyes, that
look, as if making a perpetual bet. Yes--the very same teasing, now
moody, now reckless, always astute Johnny Dromore, with a good heart
beneath an outside that seemed ashamed of it. Truly to have shared