is feet the long
shadow from the bust of Sophocles lay dusk upon the dull crimson; the
level light from the west streamed over the bookshelves, lying softly
on brown Russia leather and milk-white vellum, lighting up the
delicate gold of the tooling, glowing in the blood-red splashes of the
lettering pieces; it fell slant-wise on the black chimney piece,
chiselling afresh the Harden motto: _Invictus_. There was nothing
meretricious, nothing flagrantly modern there, as in that place of
books he had just left; its bloom was the bloom of time, the beauty of
a world already passing away. Yet how he had loved it; how he had
given himself up to it; how it had soothed him with its suggestion of
immortal things. And now, for this last time, he felt himself
surrounded by intelligences, influences; above the voices of his
anguish and his shame he heard the stately generations calling; they
approved; they upheld him in his resolution.

He turned and saw Lucia standing beside him. She had come in unheard,
as on that evening which seemed now so long ago.

She held out her hand. Not to have shaken hands with the poor fellow,
would, she felt, have been to condemn him without a hearing.

He did not see the offered hand, nor yet the chair it signed to him
to take. As if he knew that he was on his trial, he stood rigidly
before her. His eyes alone approached her, looking to hers to see if
they condemned him.

Lucia's eyes were strictly non-committal. They, too, seemed to stand
still, to wait, wide and expectant, for his defence. Her attitude was
so far judicial that she was not going to help him by a leading
question. She merely relieved the torture of his visible bodily
constraint by inviting him to sit down. He dropped into a chair that
stood obliquely by the window, and screwed himself round in it so as
to face her.

"I saw my father this morning," he began. "I went up by the early
train."

"I know."

"Then you know by this time that I was a day too late."

"Mr. Pilkington sent me your father's letter."

"What did you think of it?"

The question, so cool, so sudden, so direct, was not what she felt she
had a right to expect from him.

"Well--what did you think of it yourself?"

She looked at him and saw that she had said a cruel thing.

"Can't you imagine what I think of it?"

This again was too sudden; it took her at a disadvantage, compelling
her instantly to commit herself to a theory of innocence or
complicity.