looking to her to found another family--she had so frequently become a
mother in the past. But month succeeded month, and she for ever
disappointed me, and at last I abandoned hope. In solitude and exile
Mercedes degenerated sadly; got monstrously fat; too indolent to gnaw,
let her teeth grow to a preposterous length; and in the end died of a
surfeit of _smetana_.

When I returned to Paris, at the age of twenty, to _faire mon droit_
in the Latin Quarter, I paid a visit to our old house, and discovered
the same old concierge in the _loge_. I asked her about the mice, and
she told me her children had found the care of them such a bother that
at first they had neglected them, and at last allowed them to escape.
'They took to the walls, and for a long time afterwards, Monsieur,
the mice of this neighbourhood were pied. To this day they are of a
paler hue than elsewhere.'

A BROKEN LOOKING-GLASS

He climbed the three flights of stone stairs, and put his key into the
lock; but before he turned it, he stopped--to rest, to take breath. On
the door his name was painted in big white letters, Mr. Richard Dane.
It is always silent in the Temple at midnight; to-night the silence
was dense, like a fog. It was Sunday night; and on Sunday night, even
within the hushed precincts of the Temple, one is conscious of a
deeper hush.

When he had lighted the lamp in his sitting-room, he let himself drop
into an armchair before the empty fireplace. He was tired, he was
exhausted. Yet nothing had happened to tire him. He had dined, as he
always dined on Sundays, with the Rodericks, in Cheyne Walk; he had
driven home in a hansom. There was no reason why he should be tired.
But he was tired. A deadly lassitude penetrated his body and his
spirit, like a fluid. He was too tired to go to bed.

'I suppose I am getting old,' he thought.

To a second person the matter would have appeared not one of
supposition but of certainty, not of progression but of
accomplishment. Getting old indeed? But he _was_ old. It was an old
man, grey and wrinkled and wasted, who sat there, limp, sunken upon
himself, in his easy-chair. In years, to be sure, he was under sixty;
but he looked like a man of seventy-five.

'I am getting old, I suppose I am getting old.'

And vaguely, dully, he contemplated his life, spread out behind him
like a misty landscape, and thought what a failure it had been. What
had it come to? What had it brought him? What had he