ive effort of mind to break through this subtle glasslike
atmosphere of dream that had stolen over consciousness, and blotted out
the significance, almost the meaning of the past. He turned abruptly.
Empty as the empty rooms around him, unanswering were mind and heart.
Life was a tale told by an idiot--signifying nothing.

He paused at the head of the staircase. And even then the doubt
confronted him: Would he ever come back? Who knows? he thought; and
again stood pondering, arguing, denying. At last he seemed to have come
to a decision. He made his way downstairs, opened and left ajar a long
narrow window in a passage to the garden beyond the kitchen. He turned
on his heel as he reached the gate and waved his hand as if in a kind of
forlorn mockery towards the darkly glittering windows. The drowsy pony
awoke at touch of the whip.

Grisel lifted the rug and squeezed a little closer into the corner. She
had drawn a veil over her face, so that to Lawford her eyes seemed to
be dreaming in a little darkness of their own as he laid his hand on
the side of the cart. 'It's a most curious thing,' he said, 'but peeping
down at you just now when the sound of the wheels came, a memory came
clearly back to me of years and years ago--of my mother. She used to
come to fetch me at school in a little cart like this, and a little
pony just like this, with a thick dusty coat. And once I remember I was
simply sick of everything, a failure, and fagged out, and all that, and
was looking out in the twilight; I fancy even it was autumn too. It was
a little side staircase window; I was horribly homesick. And she came
quite unexpectedly. I shall never forget it--the misery, and then, her
coming.' He lifted his eyes, cowed with the incessant struggle, and
watched her face for some time in silence. 'Ought I to stay?'

'I see no "ought,"' she said. 'No one is there?'

'Only a miserable broken voice out of a broken cage--called Conscience.'

'Don't you think, perhaps, that even that has a good many
disguises--convention, cowardice, weakness, ennui; they all take their
turn at hooting in its feathers? You must, you really must have rest.
You don't know; you don't see; I do. Just a little snap, some one last
exquisite thread gives way, and then it is all over. You see I have even
to try to frighten you, for I can't tell you how you distress me.'

'Why do I distress you?--my face, my story you mean?'

'No; I mean you: your trouble, that horrible