faintly,
dingily sweet, like an empty wine-bottle. He went softly on a few paces
and just opening the door looked in on the faintly glittering twilight
of the drawing-room. But the congealed stump of candle that he had set
in the corner as a final rancorous challenge to the beaten Shade was
gone. He slowly and deliberately ascended the stairs, conscious of a
peculiar sense of ownership of what in even so brief an absence had
taken on so queer a look of strangeness. It was almost as if he might be
some lone heir come in the rather mournful dusk to view what melancholy
fate had unexpectedly bestowed on him.

'Work in'--what on earth else could this chill sense of strangeness
mean? Would he ever free his memory from that one haphazard, haunting
hint? And as he stood in the doorway of the big, calm room, which seemed
even now to be stirring with the restless shadow of these last few
far-away days; now pacing sullenly to and fro; now sitting hunched-up to
think; and now lying impotent in a vain, hopeless endeavour only for the
breath of a moment to forget--he awoke out of reverie to find himself
smiling at the thought that a changed face was practically at the mercy
of an incredulous world, whereas a changed heart was no one's deadly
dull affair but its owner's. The merest breath of pity even stole over
him for the Sabathier who after all had dared and had needed, perhaps,
nothing like so arrogant and merciless a coup de grace to realise that
he had so ignominiously failed.

'But there, that's done!' he exclaimed out loud, not without a tinge of
regret that theories, however brilliant and bizarre, could never now be
anything else--that now indeed that the symptoms had gone, the 'malady,'
for all who had not been actually admitted into the shocked circle,
was become nothing more than an inanely 'tall' story; stuffing not
even savoury enough for a goose. How wide exactly, he wondered, would
Sheila's discreet, shocked circle prove? He stood once more before the
looking-glass, hearing again Grisel's words in the still green shadow
of the beech-tree, 'Except of course, horribly, horribly ill.' 'What a
fool, what a coward she thinks I am!'

There was still nearly an hour to be spent in this great barn of faded
interests. He lit a candle and descended into the kitchen. A mouse went
scampering to its hole as he pushed open the door. The memory of that
ravenous morning meal nauseated him. It was sour and very still here;
he stood