e tapering hands."
Jasper Penny replied, "It seems my hair is grey." Silence fell on them
as they entered the dining room. A long table was burdened with
elaborate pagodas of spun barley sugar topped with sprigs of orange
blossom, the moulded creams of a Charlotte Polonaise, champagne jelly
valanced with lemon peel, pyramids of glazed fruits on lacquered plates;
with faintly iridescent Belleek and fluted glass and ormolu; and,
everywhere, the pale multitudinous flames of candles and the fuller
radiance of astral lamps hung with lustres. Jasper Penny idly tore open
a bon bon wrapped in a verse on fringed paper,

"Viens! Viens! ange du ciel, je t'aime! je t'aime!
Et te le dire ici, c'est le bonheur supreme."

Love and the great hour of life! He had missed both; one, perhaps, with
the other. His marriage to Phebe, except for a brief flare at the
beginning, had been as empty as the affair with Essie Scofield. God, how
hollow living seemed! He had missed something; or else existence was an
ugly deception, the false lure of an incomprehensible jest. The music
beat in faint, mocking waves on his hearing, the lights of the supper
shone in the gold bubbles of his wine glass. He drained it hurriedly.
Outside the night, lying cold on deserted squares, blurred with gas
lamps, was like a vain death after the idle frivolity of Stephen
Jannan's ball. In an instant, in the shutting of a door, the blackness
had claimed him; the gaiety of warm flesh and laughter vanished. Death
... and he had literally nothing in his hands, nothing in his heart. A
duty, Eunice, remained. The sound of his footfalls on the bricks, thrown
back from blank walls, resembled the embodied, stealthy following of the
injustice he had wrought.

XII

The following morning he made his way past the continuous produce arcade
that held the centre of Market Street to the Camden Ferry. At the river
the fish stall, with its circular green roof and cornucopias, reached
almost to the gloomy ferry-house with its heavy odour of wet wood. The
boat clattered through broken ice, by a trim packet ship, the
_Susquehanna_, and into the narrow canal through Windmill Island. Camden
was a depressing region of low, marshy land, its streets unpaved and
without gas, the gutters full of frozen, stagnant water. He inquired the
way to the Reverend Mr. Needles', passed a brick meeting house, and,
turning into Fourth Street, isolated frame dwellings, coming at last to
a dingy wood