tance, he had come into the
property with an immense antipathy:--a white elephant that would
bring him neither profit nor honour, but which the modest competence
that he had previously enjoyed did not allow him to refuse. It had
altered the tenor of his existence, destroyed his youth and his
ambitions, and represented for many years, more completely than
anything else, the element of failure which had run through his
life.

And, after all, now that deliverance was at hand, he was by no means
jubilant. In escaping from this thraldom of so many years, he felt
something of the chagrin with which a man witnesses the removal of
some long-cherished and inveterate grievance; the more so, in that
he could now remind himself impartially how small it had been, how
little, after all, he had allowed it to weigh upon him. In effect,
had he not always done very much as he liked, lived half his time
abroad in his preferred places, chosen his own friends, and followed
his own tastes without greatly considering his inherited occupation?
He must look deeper than that, he reflected, within himself, or into
the nature of things themselves, actually to seize and define that
curious flaw which had made life seem to him at last (from what
wearied psychologist, read long ago and half forgotten, did he cull
the phrase?) "a long disease of the spirit."

For appreciations of this kind, he had, nowadays, ample leisure; and
unprofitable as it appeared (he did not even pretend to himself that
it would lead anywhere, since what faint illumination he might
strike from it could only refer to the past), he was seldom tired of
searching for them.

A hard March, cited generally as the coldest within the memory of a
generation, following a winter of fog and rain, had made him an
inveterate prisoner within the four walls of his apartment. He had,
indeed, the run of others at this time, for the Bullens had left him
(at the last there had been no question of little Margot's
appropriation; Rainham had taken it so serenely for granted that she
would remain with him), but this was a privilege of which he did not
avail himself. And the place, stripped of all its commercial
attributes, had fallen into an immense desuetude, to which the charm
of silence, and of a deeper solitude than it had ever possessed
before, was attached.

The dock gates were finally closed; a hard frost of many days'
duration had almost hermetically sealed them, and the drip of Thames