d died. Hope--the hope of hearing the
patter of a child's feet about my house, the hope of pride in a
quasi-paternity, of handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of
life--hope was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin. Only a
great, quiet love remained. I was a tired old man, and Carlotta was to
me an infinitely loved sister--or daughter--or granddaughter even--so
old did I feel. And when I raised her from the fender-stool, and kissed
the tears from her eyes, it was as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been
given in this world.

The same old problem again. What the deuce to do with Carlotta? Yet not
quite the same: rather, what the deuce to do with Carlotta and myself?
In our strange relationship we were inextricably bound together.

First, she needed sunshine--instead of the forlorn bleakness of an
English spring--and a change from this house of pain and death. And
then I, too, felt the need of wider horizons. London had grown to be a
nightmare city which I never entered. Its restless ambitions were not
mine. Its pleasures pleased me not. With not five of its five million
inhabitants dared I speak heart to heart. Judith had gone out of my
life. My aunts and cousins regarded me as beyond the moral pale. Mrs.
McMurray was still unaware of my return to England. I confess to shabby
treatment of my kind friend. I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta
in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta? Reasoning now
I am convinced that she would: in those days I did not reason. I shrank
like a snail into its shell. The simile is commonplace; but so was
I--the most commonplace human snail that ever occupied a commonplace
ten-roomed shell. And now the house and its useless books and its
million-fold more useless manuscript "History of Renaissance Morals,"
all its sombre memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities,
became an unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble
existence. I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure
Renaissance morals, and to go forth with Carlotta into the wilderness
and the sunshine, there to fulfil whatever destiny the high gods should
decree.

CHAPTER XXV

Again I sit on the housetop in Mogador on the Morocco coast, where a
month ago I began to write these latter pages. Time has passed quickly
since that day.

I said then that on the previous afternoon something had happened. It
was something which I might have foreseen, which,