ath under the trees, then his thoughts would leave
him, and he would listen and listen till it had died quite out. It was
all so very far away. And they too--these talkers--so very far away; as
remote and yet as clear as the characters in a play when they have made
their final bow, and have left the curtained stage, and one is standing
uncompanioned and nearly the last of the spectators, and the lights that
have summoned back reality again are being extinguished. It was only by
painful effort of mind that he kept recalling himself to himself--why he
was here; what it all meant; that this was indeed actuality.

Yet, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was
little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark.
He glanced around him in the clear, black, stirless air. Here and there,
it seemed, a humped or spindled form held against all comers its passive
place. Here and there a tiny faintness of light played. Night after
night these chairs and tables kept their blank vigil. Why, he thought,
pleased as an overtired child with the fancy, in a sense they were
always alone, shut up in a kind of senselessness--just like us all. But
what--what, he had suddenly risen from his chair to ask himself--what
on earth are they alone with? No precise answer had been forthcoming to
that question. But as in turning in the doorway, he looked out into
the night, flashing here and there in dark spaces of the sky above
the withering apple leaves--the long dark wall and quiet untrodden
road--with the tumultuous beating of the stars--one thing at least he
was conscious of having learned in these last few days: he knew what
kind of a place he was alone IN.

It seemed to weave a spell over him, to call up a nostalgia he had lost
all remembrance of since childhood. And that queer homesickness, at
any rate, was all Sabathier's doing, he thought, smiling in his rather
careworn fashion. Sabathier! It was this mystery, bereft now of all
fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and
yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were
only really appreciable with one's legs, as it were, dangling down over
into the grave.

Just with one's lantern lit, on the edge of the whispering unknown, and
a reiterated going back out of the solitude into the light and warmth,
to the voices and glancing of eyes, to say good-bye:--that after all was
this life on earth for those who