shines for a
moment, some shape is clearly seen. The curtains were not quite drawn,
and a plane-tree branch with leaves still hanging, which had kept them
company all the fifteen years they had lived there, was moving darkly in
the wind, now touching the glass with a frail tap, as though asking
of him, who had been roaming in that wind so many hours, to let it in.
Unfailing comrades--London plane-trees!

He had not dared hope that Sylvia would be asleep. It was merciful that
she was, whichever way the issue went--that issue so cruel. Her face was
turned towards the fire, and one hand rested beneath her cheek. So she
often slept. Even when life seemed all at sea, its landmarks lost, one
still did what was customary. Poor tender-hearted thing--she had not
slept since he told her, forty-eight hours, that seemed such years,
ago! With her flaxen hair, and her touching candour, even in sleep, she
looked like a girl lying there, not so greatly changed from what she had
been that summer of Cicely's marriage down at Hayle. Her face had not
grown old in all those twenty-eight years. There had been till now no
special reason why it should. Thought, strong feeling, suffering, those
were what changed faces; Sylvia had never thought very deeply, never
suffered much, till now. And was it for him, who had been careful of
her--very careful on the whole, despite man's selfishness, despite her
never having understood the depths of him--was it for him of all people
to hurt her so, to stamp her face with sorrow, perhaps destroy her
utterly?

He crept a little farther in and sat down in the arm-chair beyond the
fire. What memories a fire gathered into it, with its flaky ashes, its
little leaf-like flames, and that quiet glow and flicker! What tale of
passions! How like to a fire was a man's heart! The first young fitful
leapings, the sudden, fierce, mastering heat, the long, steady sober
burning, and then--that last flaming-up, that clutch back at its own
vanished youth, the final eager flight of flame, before the ashes
wintered it to nothing! Visions and memories he saw down in the fire, as
only can be seen when a man's heart, by the agony of long struggle,
has been stripped of skin, and quivers at every touch. Love! A strange
haphazard thing was love--so spun between ecstacy and torture! A thing
insidious, irresponsible, desperate. A flying sweetness, more poignant
than anything on earth, more dark in origin and destiny. A thing without