e, and I took it off afore going that the damp mid not spoil the
crape. You see, she was bad a long time, and I have to be careful, and
do washing and ironing for a living. She hurt her side with wringing up
the large sheets she had to wash for the Castle folks here.'

'I hope you won't hurt yourself doing it, my dear.'

'O no, that I sha'n't! There's Charl Woollat, and Sammy Scribben, and
Ted Gibsey, and lots o' young chaps; they'll wring anything for me if
they happen to come along. But I can hardly trust 'em. Sam Scribben
t'other day twisted a linen tablecloth into two pieces, for all the
world as if it had been a pipe-light. They never know when to stop in
their wringing.'

The voice truly was his Avice's; but Avice the Second was clearly more
matter-of-fact, unreflecting, less cultivated than her mother had been.
This Avice would never recite poetry from any platform, local or other,
with enthusiastic appreciation of its fire. There was a disappointment
in his recognition of this; yet she touched him as few had done: he
could not bear to go away. 'How old are you?' he asked.

'Going in nineteen.'

It was about the age of her double, Avice the First, when he and she had
strolled together over the cliffs during the engagement. But he was now
forty, if a day. She before him was an uneducated laundress, and he was
a sculptor and a Royal Academician, with a fortune and a reputation. Yet
why was it an unpleasant sensation to him just then to recollect that he
was two score?

He could find no further excuse for remaining, and having still
half-an-hour to spare he went round by the road to the other or west
side of the last-century 'Sylvania Castle,' and came to the furthest
house out there on the cliff. It was his early home. Used in the summer
as a lodging-house for visitors, it now stood empty and silent, the
evening wind swaying the euonymus and tamarisk boughs in the front--the
only evergreen shrubs that could weather the whipping salt gales which
sped past the walls. Opposite the house, far out at sea, the familiar
lightship winked from the sandbank, and all at once there came to him a
wild wish--that, instead of having an artist's reputation, he could be
living here an illiterate and unknown man, wooing, and in a fair way of
winning, the pretty laundress in the cottage hard by.

2. V. THE RESUMPTION TAKES PLACE

Having returned to London he mechanically resumed his customary life;
but he was not reall