no more deck out your silent rooms with flowers,
humming the while some happy little song.

The little piano is dumb night after night, its candles unlighted, and
there is no one to play Chopin to us now as the day dies, and the
shadows stoop out of their corners to listen in vain. Old house, old
house! We are alone, quite alone,--there is no mistake about
that,--and the soul has gone out of both of us. And as for the garden,
there is no company there; that is loneliest of all. The very sunlight
looks desolation, falling through the thick-blossoming apple-trees as
through the chinks and crevices of deserted Egyptian cities.

While as for the books--well, never talk to me again about the
companionship of books! For just when one needs them most of all they
seem suddenly to have grown dull and unsympathetic, not a word of
comfort, not a charm anywhere in them to make us forget the slow-moving
hours; whereas, when Margaret was here--but it is of no use to say any
more! Everything was quite different when Margaret was here: that is
enough. Margaret has gone away to the Fortunate Isles. Of course
she'll come to see us now and again; but it won't be the same thing.
Yes! old echoing silent House of Joy that is Gone, we are quite alone.
Now, what is to be done?

CHAPTER II

IN WHICH I DECIDE TO GO ON PILGRIMAGE

Though I have this bad habit of soliloquising, and indeed am absurd
enough to attempt conversation with a house, yet the reader must
realise from the beginning that I am still quite a young man. I talked
a little just now as though I were an octogenarian. Actually, as I
said, I am but just gone thirty, and I may reasonably regard life, as
the saying is, all before me. I was a little down-hearted when I wrote
yesterday. Besides, I wrote at the end of the afternoon, a melancholy
time. The morning is the time to write. We are all--that is, those of
us who sleep well--optimists in the morning. And the world is sad
enough without our writing books to make it sadder. The rest of this
book, I promise you, shall be written of a morning. This book! oh,
yes, I forgot!--I am going to write a book. A book about what? Well,
that must be as God wills. But listen! As I lay in bed this morning
between sleeping and waking, an idea came riding on a sunbeam into my
room,--a mad, whimsical idea, but one that suits my mood; and put
briefly, it is this: how is it that I, a not unpresentable young man, a
man not wit