new clothes,
was coming down the path. They were evidently going for a walk, for Mr.
Stone wore his hat, old and soft and black, with a strong green tinge,
and carried a paper parcel, which leaked crumbs of bread at every step.

The girl grew very red. She held her head down, as though afraid of
Hilary's inspection of her new clothes. At the gate she suddenly looked
up. His face said: 'Yes, you look very nice!' And into her eyes a look
leaped such as one may see in dogs' eyes lifted in adoration to their
masters' faces. Manifestly disconcerted, Hilary turned to Mr. Stone. The
old man was standing very still; a thought had evidently struck him. "I
have not, I think," he said, "given enough consideration to the question
whether force is absolutely, or only relatively, evil. If I saw a man
ill-treat a cat, should I be justified in striking him?"

Accustomed to such divagations, Hilary answered: "I don't know whether
you would be justifed, but I believe that you would strike him."

"I am not sure," said Mr. Stone. "We are going to feed the birds."

The little model took the paper bag. "It's all dropping out," she said.
From across the road she turned her head....'Won't you come, too?' she
seemed to say.

But Hilary passed rather hastily into the garden and shut the gate
behind him. He sat in his study, with Miranda near him, for fully
an hour, without doing anything whatever, sunk in a strange,
half-pleasurable torpor. At this hour he should have been working at his
book; and the fact that his idleness did not trouble him might well have
given him uneasiness. Many thoughts passed through his mind, imaginings
of things he had thought left behind forever--sensations and longings
which to the normal eye of middle age are but dried forms hung in the
museum of memory. They started up at the whip of the still-living youth,
the lost wildness at the heart of every man. Like the reviving flame
of half-spent fires, longing for discovery leaped and flickered in
Hilary--to find out once again what things were like before he went down
the hill of age.

No trivial ghost was beckoning him; it was the ghost, with unseen face
and rosy finger, which comes to men when youth has gone.

Miranda, hearing him so silent, rose. At this hour it was her master's
habit to scratch paper. She, who seldom scratched anything, because it
was not delicate, felt dimly that this was what he should be doing. She
held up a slim foot and touched his knee.