so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out
from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what
agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may
know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! _Happy!_--in
this world, 'where men sit and hear each other groan.' His friend's
confidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job.

What was it based on? In the first place, on Christianity--'on the
passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,' said the dreamy
spectator to himself, 'which at the first honest challenge of the
critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never
given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the
straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him,
between him and unpleasant facts!

In the evening, Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self
against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him
to Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he
stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest
of the household went to evening service.

After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy; the west was
streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the wind was rising in the
trees, and the temperature had suddenly fallen so much that when Langham
had shut himself up in Robert's study he did what he had been admonished
to do in case of need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily
into the darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and threw himself
down into Robert's chair, with a sigh of Sybaritic satisfaction.
'Good! Now for something that takes the world less naively,' he said to
himself; 'this house is too virtuous for anything.'

He opened his Montaigne and read on very happily for half an hour. The
house seemed entirely deserted.

'All the servants gone too!' he said presently, looking up and
listening. 'Anybody who wants the spoons needn't trouble about me. I
don't leave this fire.'

And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was a sound of
the swing door which separated Robert's passage from the front hall,
opening and shutting. Steps came quickly toward the study, the handle
was turned, and there on the threshold stood Rose.

He turned quickly round in his chair with a look of astonishment. She
also started as she saw him.

'I did not know anyone was in,' she said awk