was, perhaps, no more
than a venial weakness in Avice the Second. Her daughter's objection to
Jocelyn she could never understand. To her own eye he was no older than
when he had proposed to her.

As he sat darkling here the ghostly outlines of former shapes taken by
his Love came round their sister the unconscious corpse, confronting
him from the wall in sad array, like the pictured Trojan women beheld by
AEneas on the walls of Carthage. Many of them he had idealized in
bust and in figure from time to time, but it was not as such that he
remembered and reanimated them now; rather was it in all their natural
circumstances, weaknesses, and stains. And then as he came to himself
their voices grew fainter; they had all gone off on their different
careers, and he was left here alone.

The probable ridicule that would result to him from the events of the
day he did not mind in itself at all. But he would fain have removed
the misapprehensions on which it would be based. That, however, was
impossible. Nobody would ever know the truth about him; what it was he
had sought that had so eluded, tantalized, and escaped him; what it was
that had led him such a dance, and had at last, as he believed just now
in the freshness of his loss, been discovered in the girl who had left
him. It was not the flesh; he had never knelt low to that. Not a woman
in the world had been wrecked by him, though he had been impassioned
by so many. Nobody would guess the further sentiment--the cordial
loving-kindness--which had lain behind what had seemed to him the
enraptured fulfilment of a pleasing destiny postponed for forty years.
His attraction to the third Avice would be regarded by the world as the
selfish designs of an elderly man on a maid.

His life seemed no longer a professional man's experience, but a ghost
story; and he would fain have vanished from his haunts on this
critical afternoon, as the rest had done. He desired to sleep away
his tendencies, to make something happen which would put an end to his
bondage to beauty in the ideal.

So he sat on till it was quite dark, and a light was brought. There was
a chilly wind blowing outside, and the lightship on the quicksand afar
looked harassed and forlorn. The haggard solitude was broken by a ring
at the door.

Pierston heard a voice below, the accents of a woman. They had a ground
quality of familiarity, a superficial articulation of strangeness. Only
one person in all his experience ha