watched as well as acted. What if one's
earthly home were empty?--still the restless fretted traveller must
tarry; 'for the horrible worst of it is, my friend,' he said, as if to
some silent companion listening behind him, 'the worst of it is, YOUR
way was just simply, solely suicide.' What was it Herbert had called
it? Yes, a cul-de-sac--black, lofty, immensely still and old and
picturesque, but none the less merely a contemptible cul-de-sac; no
abiding place, scarcely even sufficing with its flagstones for a groan
from the fugitive and deluded refugee. There was no peace for the
wicked. The question of course then came in--Was there any peace
anywhere, for anybody?

He smiled at a sudden odd remembrance of a quiet, sardonic old aunt
whom he used to stay with as a child. 'Children should be seen and not
heard,' she would say, peering at him over his favourite pudding.

His eyes rested vacantly on the darkling street. He fell again into
reverie, gigantically brooded over by shapes only imagination dimly
conceived of: the remote alleys of his mind astir with a shadowy and
ceaseless traffic which it wasn't at least THIS life's business to
hearken after, or regard. And as he stood there in a mysteriously
thronging peaceful solitude such as he had never known before, faintly
out of the silence broke the sound of approaching hoofs. His heart
seemed to gather itself close; a momentary blindness veiled his eyes, so
wildly had his blood surged up into cheek and brain. He remained, caught
up, with head slightly inclined, listening, as, with an interminable
tardiness, measureless anguished hope died down into nothing in his
mind.

Cold and heavy, his heart began to beat again, as if to catch up those
laggard moments. He turned with an infinite revulsion of feeling to look
out on the lamps of the old fly that had drawn up at his gate.

He watched incuriously a little old lady rather arduously alight, pause,
and look up at his darkened windows, and after a momentary hesitation,
and a word over her shoulder to the cabman, stoop and fumble at the iron
latch. He watched her with a kind of wondering aversion, still scarcely
tinged with curiosity. She had succeeded in lifting the latch and in
pushing her way through, and was even now steadily advancing towards
him along the tiled path. And a minute after he recognised with the
strangest reactions the quiet old figure that had shared a sunset with
him ages and ages ago--his mother's