I can, a chance to quiet down. I
suppose every one comes sooner or later to a time in life when there
is nothing else to be done but just shut one's eyes and blunder on. And
that's all I can do now--blunder on....'

He paused, and suddenly, at the echo of the words in his mind, a
revulsion of feeling--shame and hatred of himself surged up, and he
tore his letter into tiny pieces. Once more he began, 'my dear Sheila,'
dropped his pen, sat on for a long time, cold and inert, harbouring
almost unendurably a pitiful, hopeless longing.... He would write to
Grisel another day.

He leant back in his chair, his fingers pressed against his eyelids. And
clearer than those which myriad-hued reality can ever present, pictures
of the imagination swam up before his eyes. It seemed, indeed, that even
now some ghost, some revenant of himself was sitting there, in the old
green churchyard, roofed only with a thousand thousand stars. The breath
of darkness stirred softly on his cheek. Some little scampering shape
slipped by. A bird on high cried weirdly, solemnly, over the globe. He
shuddered faintly, and looked out again into the small lamplit room.

Here, too, was quite as inexplicable a coming and going. A fly was
walking on the table beneath his eyes, with the uneasy gait of one that
has outlived his hour and most of his companions. Mice were scampering
and shrieking in the empty kitchen. And all about him, in the viewless
air, the phantoms of another life passed by, unmindful of his motionless
body. He fell into a lethargy of the senses, and only gradually became
aware after a while of the strange long-drawn sigh of rain at the
window. He rose and opened it. The night air flowed in, chilled with its
waters and faintly fragrant of the dust. It soothed away all thought for
a while. He turned back to his chair. He would wait until the rain had
lulled before starting....

A little before midnight the door was softly, and with extreme care,
pushed open, and Mr Bethany's old face, with an intense and sharpened
scrutiny, looked in on the lamplit room. And as if still intent on
the least sound within the empty walls around him, he came near, and
stooping across the table, stared through his spectacles at the sidelong
face of his friend, so still, with hands so lightly laid on the arms of
his chair that the old man had need to watch closely to detect in his
heavy slumber the slow measured rise and fall of his breast.

He turned wearily