the door close, and the dying away of the sound that had
been the unceasing accompaniment of all these later years--the rustling
of his wife's skirts, her crisp, authoritative footstep. And he turned
towards the flooding sunlight that streamed in on the upturned surface
of the looking-glass. No clear decisive thought came into his mind, only
a vague recognition that so far as Sheila was concerned this was the
end. No regret, no remorse visited him. He was just alone again, that
was all--alone, as in reality he had always been alone, without having
the sense or power to see or to acknowledge it. All he had said had been
the mere flotsam of the moment, and now it stood stark and irrevocable
between himself and the past.

He sat down dazed and stupid. Again and again a struggling recollection
tried to obtrude itself; again and again he beat it back. And rather
for something to distract his attention than for any real interest
or enlightenment he might find in its pages, he took out the grimy
dog's-eared book that Herbert had given him, and turned slowly over the
leaves till he came to Sabathier once more. Snatches of remembrance of
their long talk returned to him, but just as that dark, water-haunted
house had seemed to banish remembrance and the reality of the room in
which he now sat, and of the old familiar life; so now the house, the
faces of yesterday seemed in their turn unreal, almost spectral, and
the thick print on the smudgy page no more significant than a story one
reads and throws away.

But a moment's comparison in the glass of the two faces side by
side suddenly sharpened his attention--the resemblance was so oddly
arresting, and yet, and yet, so curiously inconclusive. There was then
something of the stolid old Saxon left, he thought. Or had it been
regained? Which was it? Not merely the complexity of the question, but
a half-conscious distaste of attempting to face it, set him reading very
slowly and laboriously, for his French was little more than fragmentary
recollection, the first few pages of the life of this buried Sabathier.
But with a disinclination almost amounting to aversion he made very slow
progress. Many of the words were meaningless to him, and every other
moment he found himself listening with intense concentration for the
least hint of what Sheila was doing, of what was going on in the house
beneath him. He had not very long to wait. He was sitting with his head
leaning on his hand, the bo