n,
and outside the great mountains, in a dewy dawn, were beginning to show
purple through dim veils of silvery cloud. He stood still, looking out.
His mind was churning like a yeasty sea. Old facts came to the surface;
faces once familiar; the form and countenance of a brother drowned at
twenty in Sandford lasher on the Oxford Thames; friends of his early
manhood, riding beside him to hounds, or over the rolling green of the
Campagna. Old instincts long suppressed, yet earlier and more primitive
in him than those of the huckster and the curio-hunter, stirred uneasily.
It was true that he was getting old, and had been too long alone. He
thought with vindictive bitterness of Netta, who had robbed and deserted
him. And then, again, of his involuntary guest.

The strangest medley of ideas ran through his mind. Self-pity;
recollections connected with habits on which he had deliberately turned
his back some thirty years before--the normal pleasures, friendships,
occupations of English society; fanatical hatred and resentment--against
two women in particular, the first of whom had, in his opinion,
deliberately spoilt his life by a double cruelty, while the second--his
wife--whom he had plucked up out of poverty, and the dust-heap of her
disreputable relations, had ungratefully and wickedly rebelled against
and deserted him.

Also--creeping through all his thoughts, like a wandering breeze in the
dark, stole again and again the chilling consciousness of old age--and of
the end, waiting. He was fiercely tenacious of life, and his seventieth
birthday had rung a knell in his ears that still sounded. So defiant
was he of death, that he had never yet brought himself to make a will. He
would not admit to himself that he was mortal; or make arrangements that
seemed to admit the grim fact--weakly accepted--into the citadel of a
still warm life.

Yet the physical warnings of old age had not been absent. Some day he
would feel, perhaps suddenly--the thought of it sent through him a shiver
of impotent revolt against the human destiny--the clutch of the master
whom none escapes.

Vague feelings, and shapeless terrors!--only subterraneously connected
with the wounded man lying in his house.

And yet they were connected. The advent of the unconscious youth below
had acted on the ugly stagnation of the Threlfall life with a touch of
crystallizing force. Melrose felt it in his own way no less than the
Dixons. Something seemed to have end