that you will have for six months.
Dear, dear, what lunatics we all are, to be sure! Why, we're as happy
as little birds in their nests out in the decent country, and yet we
scamper off to a smoky old city by the Thames to rush along with the
world, instead of sitting high and far away from it and watching it go
by. God bless my soul, I'm old enough to know better! Well, let me help
you in, my dear," he added to his wife; "and in you go, Marion; and in
you go, your imperial highness"--he passed the child awkwardly in to
Marion; "and in you go, my daughter," he added, as he handed Lali in,
pressing her hand with a brusque fatherliness as he did so. He then got
in after them.

Richard came to the side of the carriage and bade them all good-bye one
by one. Lali gave him her hand, but did not speak a word. He called a
cheerful adieu, the horses were whipped up, and in a moment Richard was
left alone on the steps of the house. He stood for a time looking, then
he turned to go into the house, but changed his mind, sat down, lit
a cigar, and did not move from his seat until he was summoned to his
lonely luncheon.

Nobody thought much of leaving Richard behind at Greyhope. It seemed
the natural thing to do. But still he had not been left alone--entirely
alone--for three years or more.

The days and weeks went on. If Richard had been accounted eccentric
before, there was far greater cause for the term now. Life dragged.
Too much had been taken out of his life all at once; for, in the first
place, the family had been drawn together more during the trouble which
Lali's advent had brought; then the child and its mother, his pupil,
were gone also. He wandered about in a kind of vague unrest. The hardest
thing in this world to get used to is the absence of a familiar footstep
and the cheerful greeting of a familiar eye. And the man with no chick
or child feels even the absence of his dog from the hearth-rug when
he returns from a journey or his day's work. It gives him a sense of
strangeness and loss. But when it is the voice of a woman and the hand
of a child that is missed, you can back no speculation upon that man's
mood or mind or conduct. There is no influence like the influence of
habit, and that is how, when the minds of people are at one, physical
distances and differences, no matter how great, are invisible, or at
least not obvious.

Richard Armour was a sensible man; but when one morning he suddenly
packed a portmantea