hing her,
he found to have departed; and, though fairly weaned by the natural
reality, he was so far staunch as to linger hankeringly. They talked of
past days, his old attachment, which she had then despised, being now
far more absorbing and present to her than to himself.

She unmistakably won upon him as he sat on. A curious closeness between
them had been produced in his imagination by the discovery that she
was passing her life within the house of his own childhood. Her similar
surname meant little here; but it was also his, and, added to the
identity of domicile, lent a strong suggestiveness to the accident.

'This is where I used to sit when my parents occupied the house,'
he said, placing himself beside that corner of the fireplace which
commanded a view through the window. 'I could see a bough of tamarisk
wave outside at that time, and, beyond the bough, the same abrupt grassy
waste towards the sea, and at night the same old lightship blinking far
out there. Place yourself on the spot, to please me.'

She set her chair where he indicated, and Pierston stood close beside
her, directing her gaze to the familiar objects he had regarded thence
as a boy. Her head and face--the latter thoughtful and worn enough, poor
thing, to suggest a married life none too comfortable--were close to his
breast, and, with a few inches further incline, would have touched it.

'And now you are the inhabitant; I the visitor,' he said. 'I am glad to
see you here--so glad, Avice! You are fairly well provided for--I think
I may assume that?' He looked round the room at the solid mahogany
furniture, and at the modern piano and show bookcase.

'Yes, Ike left me comfortable. 'Twas he who thought of moving from my
cottage to this larger house. He bought it, and I can live here as long
as I choose to.'

Apart from the decline of his adoration to friendship, there seemed to
be a general convergence of positions which suggested that he might make
amends for the desertion of Avice the First by proposing to this Avice
when a meet time should arrive. If he did not love her as he had done
when she was a slim thing catching mice in his rooms in London, he could
surely be content at his age with comradeship. After all she was only
forty to his sixty. The feeling that he really could be thus content
was so convincing that he almost believed the luxury of getting old and
reposeful was coming to his restless, wandering heart at last.

'Well, you h