ne of the smaller Inns
of Court, and was looking at the stale mirth and madness of the bygone
days. Eight out of ten of the men he remembered had settled down, and
two of the ten, to make an average, had gone to the devil The two
were mainly of the better sort--fellows who stuck to an absurd
responsibility, and let it ruin them. The eight were the good citizens
who had had the wit to cut responsibility adrift. That was life as he
knew it, as the boys of his day who studied divinity or medicine, or who
read for the Bar, or who worked in painting or at journalism or letters,
all knew it. Clerics, lawyers, painters, authors, men on 'Change, all
married and settled and respected, admirable citizens by the dozen and
the score, and where are Lorna, and Clara, and Kate, and Caroline, and
Fanny? Heaven knows--possibly. The knack of prosperity, surely, is to
bury your indiscretions.

Oh, bitter, bitter, bitter to have loaded life with such a burden, not
to have had the courage of a hundred others, and to have left the poor
responsibility to sink or swim, to have compounded between vice or
virtue instead of making a clean bargain with one or the other like
the rest of the world, to have permitted a foolish pity to look like
a resolute manhood to his eyes, to have throttled his own soul for a
scruple!

He stages his own soul, and this is what he sees and hears and knows.

Annette is ailing, is seriously ill indeed, and he has taken her into
the country. He has rented a cottage, in the front of which there is
a great level common reaching for a mile or two on either side, and
covered with golden gorse. In front of the cottage and across the common
is a coppice, all browns and purples and yellows and siennas, and beyond
that, as seen from the upper windows of the cottage, the land fades into
misty autumnal blues, to join a whitened horizon which seems to shun
the meeting, until for very weariness it can postpone it no longer--a
bell-tent of sky, as it were, with a lifted edge, and beyond the skirts
of the nearer sky another. Annette is lying in bed, and Paul is looking
out of the window; he will see the landscape in that way always. He has
known it under broad summer sunshine, in springtide freshness, under
winter snow, obscured in sheeting rain, in moonlight, starlight, dawn,
sunset; but whenever his thoughts go backwards to the place he is
looking out of the window on that particular aspect of the scene, and
Annette is behind h