days behind him. If one could but tie up anyhow that stained bundle of
inconsequent memories called life, and fling it into a cupboard remoter
even than Bluebeard's, and lock the door, and drop the quickly-rusting
key into these living waters!

He dressed himself with window thrown open to the blackbirds and
thrushes, and the occasional shrill solitary whistling of a robin. But,
like the sour-sweet fragrance of the brier, its wandering desolate burst
of music had power to wake memory, and carried him instantly back to
that first aimless descent into the evening gloom of Widderstone from
which it was in vain to hope ever to climb again. Surely never a more
ghoulish face looked out on its man before than that which confronted
him as with borrowed razor he stood shaving those sunken chaps, that
angular chin.

And even now, beneath the lantern of broad daylight, just as within that
other face had lurked the undeniable ghost and presence of himself, so
beneath the sunken features seemed to float, tenuous as smoke, scarcely
less elusive than a dream, between eye and object, the sinister darkness
of the face that in those two bouts with fear he had by some strange
miracle managed to repel.

'Work in,' the chance phrase came back. It had worked in in sober
earnest; and so far as the living of the next few weeks went, surely it
might prove an ally without which he simply could not conceive himself
as struggling on at all.

But as dexterous minds as even restless Sabathier's had him just now in
safe and kindly keeping. All the quiet October morning Herbert kept him
talking and stooping over his extraordinary collection of books.

'The point is,' he explained to Lawford, standing amid a positive
archipelago of precious 'finds,' with his foot hoisted onto a chair and
a patched-up, sea-stained folio on his knee, 'I honestly detest the mere
give and take of what we are fools enough to call life. I don't deny
Life's there,' he swept his hand towards the open window--'in that
frantic Tophet we call London; but there's no focus, no point of
vantage. Even a scribbler only gets it piecemeal and through a dulled
medium. We learn to read before we know how to see; we swallow our
tastes, convictions, and emotions whole; so that nine-tenths of the
world's nectar is merely honeydew.' He smiled pleasantly into the
fixed vacancy of his visitor's face. 'That's why I've just gone on,' he
continued amiably, 'collecting this particular kind of