It seemed as if the farther he went away from Marget’s the closer it followed up. Just at first he had seemed to leave it right behind, and yet in the heart of the dream it was waiting on the step. The one door of the viaduct that he had seen still wide had not succeeded in closing, after all. That meant that, when he went to bed, he would not be safe, because Marget might come and peer at him as he slept. The thing that might have swamped her and shut her out had not so much as begun to come to pass. He could not conjure her out of the house, because magic had failed him as he stepped inside. If there was anything there that belonged to himself, it had done nothing for him yet but make him sad. Yet he couldn’t help feeling that the joy was only slightly out of reach; as if he looked at it through a window, but could not come inside. His heart was heavy, as heavy as wet grass. Nothing, he told himself, was going right. Even the chair he sat in wasn’t right. “I doubt I mun be getting old bones,” he said at last. “Chair don’t seem to fit me same as it used.” Thomas had been busy with a contented little whistled tune, but he broke it off in the middle when his father spoke. “’Tisn’t the old chair, dad,” he said, a little abashed. “Yon went wi’ the rest o’ the furniture at the sale.” Kit stared at him a moment with a puzzled frown, and then, as if still at a loss, he dropped his gaze to the chair. Thomas saw that he was thinking hard as he ran his hands repeatedly over the arms. While he was at Marget’s he had remembered many sales, but apparently he had never remembered his own. In those crowds of his he had seen many a chair sold, but his own had never come to the hammer under his eyes. How could it do anything of the sort when it had stayed safely in the dream, waiting in the house until he should come back? Yet it had vanished, after all, when the dream had come about, and there was only this false pretender in its place. When he stopped rubbing the arms he peered at the legs, and twisted round to stare at the leather back. It was a shop-chair, that was plain, varnished and hard-stuffed, unyielding as old bread. It almost seemed to reject him as he sat, refusing the purpose for which it had been made. It was handsome enough to look at, of its kind, making a great show with leather and brass nails, but as yet it was only an effigy of a chair. No ghost as yet had clung to its hard seat, those stubborn ghosts which hammers couldn’t eject. No shadowy arms would steal and clasp him round as he sighed himself asleep on a twilit afternoon. It was a mindless chair, a chair without a soul, the price of which was the sacrifice of death. Generations must use it before it grew a soul; lover sitting on lover’s knee, children clambering about its legs. Dreams of the winter dusk would have to shut it round; the sick, the dying, console themselves in its arms. There was a long education before the new arm-chair, and he himself was the sacrifice