ou only knew how empty it's all got now; all
reason gone even to go on at all.'

'But doesn't it follow? Of course it's empty. And now life is going
to begin again. I assure you it is, I do indeed. Only, only have
courage--just the will to win on.'

He said good-night; shut-to the latched door of his long low room,
ceilinged with rafters close under the steep roof, its brown walls hung
with quiet, dark, pondering and beautiful faces looking gravely across
at him. And with his candle in his hand he sat down on the bedside. All
speculation was gone. The noisy clock of his brain had run down again.
He turned towards the old oval looking-glass on the dressing-table
without the faintest stirring of interest, suspense, or anxiety. What
did it matter what a man looked like--a now familiar but enfeebled and
deprecating voice seemed to say. He knew that a change had come. Even
Sheila had noticed it. And since then what had he not gone through? What
now was here seemed of little moment, so far at least as this world was
concerned.

At last with an effort he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in
unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed indeed
almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet languid
Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some faint
trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of the
dark Adventurer, but that--how immeasurably dimmed and blunted and
faded. He had expected to find it so. Would it (the thought vanished
across his mind) would it have been as unmistakably there had he
come hot-foot, fearing, expecting to find the other? But--was he
disappointed!

He hardly knew how long he stood there, leaning on his hands, surveying
almost listlessly in the candle-light that lined, bedraggled, grey,
hopeless countenance, those dark-socketed, smouldering eyes, whose
pupils even now were so dilated that a casual glance would have failed
to detect the least hint of any iris. 'It must have been something
pretty bad you were, you know, or something pretty bad you did,' they
seemed to be trying to say to him, 'to drag us down to this.'

He knelt down by force of habit to say his prayers; but no words came.
Well, between earthly friends a betrayal such as this would have caused
a livelong estrangement and hostility. The God the old Lawford used to
pray to would forgive him, he thought wearily, if just for the present
he was a little too so