y Tomalin, he found it quite impossible; the
face no longer existed for him; the voice was as utterly forgotten as
any he might have chanced to hear for a few minutes on that fatal
evening in Pont Street. And this was what he had seen as an object of
romantic tenderness--this vaporous nothing, this glimmer in a dazed eye!

Calm moments brought a saner self-reproach. "I simply yielded to the
common man's common temptation. I am poor, and it was wealth that
dazzled and lured me. Pride would explain more subtly; that is but a
new ground of shame. I felt a prey to the vulgarest and basest passion;
better to burn that truth into my mind, and to make the brand a
lifelong warning. I shall the sooner lift up my head again."

He seemed to palliate his act by remembering that he wished to benefit
his sisters. Neither of them--the poor dead girl, and she who lived
only for self-forgetfulness--would have been happier at the cost of his
disgrace. How well it was, indeed, that he had been saved from that
debasement in their eyes.

He lived on in the silent house, quite alone and desiring no
companionship. Few letters came for him, and he rarely saw a newspaper.
After a while he was able to forget himself in the reading of books
which tranquillised his thought, and held him far from the noises of
the passing world. So sequestered was the grey old house that he could
go forth when he chose into lanes and meadows without fear of
encountering anyone who would disturb his meditation and his enjoyment
of nature's beauty. Through the mellow days of the declining summer, he
lived amid trees and flowers, slowly recovering health and peace in
places where a bird's note, or the ripple of a stream, or the sighing
of the wind, were the only sounds under the ever-changing sky.

His thoughts were often of death, but not on that account gloomy.
Reading in his Marcus Aurelius, he said to himself that the Stoic
Emperor must, after all, have regarded death with some fear: else, why
speak of it so persistently, and with such marshalling of arguments to
prove it no matter for dread? Dymchurch never wished to shorten his
life, yet, without other logic than that of a quiet heart, came to
think more than resignedly of the end towards which he moved. He was
the last of his family, and no child would ever bear his name. Without
bitterness, he approved this extinction of a line which seemed to have
outlived its natural energies. He, at all events, would bea