brings in its
train he had hesitated for a few minutes before actually entering the
graveyard. But once safely within he had begun to feel extremely loth to
think of turning back again, and this not the less at remembering with
a real foreboding that it was now drawing towards evening, that another
day was nearly done. He trailed his umbrella behind him over the
grass-grown paths; staying here and there to read some time-worn
inscription; stooping a little broodingly over the dark green graves.
Not for the first time during the long laborious convalescence that had
followed apparently so slight an indisposition, a fleeting sense almost
as if of an unintelligible remorse had overtaken him, a vague thought
that behind all these past years, hidden as it were from his daily life,
lay something not yet quite reckoned with. How often as a boy had he
been rapped into a galvanic activity out of the deep reveries he used
to fall into--those fits of a kind of fishlike day-dream. How often,
and even far beyond boyhood, had he found himself bent on some distant
thought or fleeting vision that the sudden clash of self-possession had
made to seem quite illusory, and yet had left so strangely haunting. And
now the old habit had stirred out of its long sleep, and, through the
gate that Influenza in departing had left ajar, had returned upon him.

'But I suppose we are all pretty much the same, if we only knew it,' he
had consoled himself. 'We keep our crazy side to ourselves; that's all.
We just go on for years and years doing and saying whatever happens to
come up--and really keen about it too'--he had glanced up with a kind of
challenge in his face at the squat little belfry--'and then, without
the slightest reason or warning, down you go, and it all begins to wear
thin, and you get wondering what on earth it all means.' Memory slipped
back for an instant to the life that in so unusual a fashion seemed
to have floated a little aloof. Fortunately he had not discussed these
inward symptoms with his wife. How surprised Sheila would be to see him
loafing in this old, crooked churchyard. How she would lift her dark
eyebrows, with that handsome, indifferent tolerance. He smiled, but a
little confusedly; yet the thought gave even a spice of adventure to the
evening's ramble.

He loitered on, scarcely thinking at all now, stooping here and there.
These faint listless ideas made no more stir than the sunlight gilding
the fading leaves, the c