ittle, that Killigrew was dying,
if not already dead, when Judith wrote. He knew her well enough, and
guessed at her still more acutely, to know that she was quite capable of
so much of reticence. And why did she speak so confidently of coming
down to Cloom some time quite soon? She would not leave Paris while Joe
was still unwell.... Ishmael knew, with the sureness he had once or
twice before known things in his life, and the knowledge affected him
strangely. He felt no violent grief, but a great blank. He had not seen
Killigrew for years; but with the knowledge that he was to see him no
more went something of himself--something that had belonged to Killigrew
alone and that had responded to something in him which henceforth would
be sealed and dead. He kept himself busy all day, but now he walked fast
along the road, only accompanied by his thoughts.

The first hint of autumn was in the air that evening. The bracken had
begun to turn, and its hue was intensified by the russet warmth of the
evening sunlight, that touched each frond with fire, burnished the
granite boulders, and turned the purple of the heather to a warm
ruddiness. As Ishmael went along the hard pale road a hare, chased by a
greyhound belonging to a couple of miners, came thudding down it, and
the light turned its dim fur to bronze. It flashed past over a low wall,
and was happily lost in the confusion of furze and bracken over an old
mine-shaft. Ishmael felt a moment's gladness for its escape; then he
went on, and, soon leaving the road, he struck out over the moor.

On he went till he came to a disused china-clay pit, showing pale
flanks in the curve of the moor. A ruined shaft stood at the head, the
last of the sunset glowing through its empty window-sockets; an owl
called tremulously, the sheep answered their lambs from the dim moor. A
round pearl-pale moon swung in the east, level with the westering sun;
as he sank she rose, till the twilight suddenly wrapped the air in a
soft blue that was half a shadow, half a lighting. The last of the warm
glow had gone; only the acres of feathery bents still held a pinkish
warmth in their bleached masses.

Ishmael sat upon the dry grass, where the tiny yellow stars of the
creeping potentilla gleamed up at him through the soft dusk, and lay
almost too idle for thought.

He wondered both why he did not feel more, and why he was feeling so
much. If Killigrew had died when they were both young, Ishmael would
hav