ame of
poker, it possessed a kind of English optimism, only dangerous when, as
rarely happened, it was put to the test. He worked two full pipes long,
and looked at the clock. Twelve! No good knocking off just yet! He had
no liking for bed this many a long year, having, from loyalty to memory
and a drier sense of what became one in the Home Department, preserved
his form against temptations of the flesh. Yet, somehow, to-night he
felt no spring, no inspiration, in his handling of county constabulary.
A kind of English stolidity about them baffled him--ten of them remained
ten. And leaning that forehead, whose height so troubled Frances
Freeland, on his neat hand, he fell to brooding. Those young people with
everything before them! Did he envy them? Or was he glad of his own age?
Fifty! Fifty already; a fogey! An official fogey! For all the world like
an umbrella, that every day some one put into a stand and left there
till it was time to take it out again. Neatly rolled, too, with an
elastic and button! And this fancy, which had never come to him before,
surprised him. One day he, too, would wear out, slit all up his seams,
and they would leave him at home, or give him away to the butler.

He went to the window. A scent of--of May, or something! And nothing in
sight save houses just like his own! He looked up at the strip of sky
privileged to hang just there. He had got a bit rusty with his stars.
There, however, certainly was Venus. And he thought of how he had stood
by the ship's rail on that honeymoon trip of his twenty years ago,
giving his young wife her first lesson in counting the stars. And
something very deep down, very mossed and crusted over in John's heart,
beat and stirred, and hurt him. Nedda--he had caught her looking at that
young fellow just as Anne had once looked at him, John Freeland, now
an official fogey, an umbrella in a stand. There was a policeman!
How ridiculous the fellow looked, putting one foot before the other,
flirting his lantern and trying the area gates! This confounded scent of
hawthorn--could it be hawthorn?--got here into the heart of London! The
look in that girl's eyes! What was he about, to let them make him feel
as though he could give his soul for a face looking up into his own,
for a breast touching his, and the scent of a woman's hair. Hang it! He
would smoke a cigarette and go to bed! He turned out the light and began
to mount the stairs; they creaked abominably--the felt must