“I suppose it is because I am getting old that such gloomy fancies come into my head,” he said to himself, as he walked from the station to Greenlands. “It never struck me before that a childless man’s latter days must needs be blank and empty. Must it be so? Which is the lesser of the two evils--to be the father of an heir who languishes for his heritage, or to know that one’s lands and houses must pass to a stranger, when the door of the last narrow dwelling has been sealed upon its silent inhabitant? Who knows? Is not existence at best a choice of evils--and the negative misery is always the lesser. Better to suffer the dull sense of loneliness than the sharp agony of ingratitude. Better to be Timon than Lear.” This is how the philosopher argued with himself on his fifty-third birthday, as he walked the lonely road between Windsor and Greenlands. “Dear old Theodore!” he said to himself; “it is nine years since I have seen him--three or four since I have heard from him. God grant I may find him well--and happy!” Mr. Jerningham had walked this road often in his boyhood and youth--very often in the days when he had been an Eton boy, and had boldly levanted from his tutor’s house, and crossed that purely imaginary boundary, the Thames, for an afternoon’s holiday at home, where the horses and dogs and servants seemed alike rejoiced by the presence of the young heir. He had walked the same road at many different periods of his existence, in every one of which his own pleasure had been the chief desire of his heart; not always to be achieved, at any cost, and rarely achieved with ultimate satisfaction to himself. He had travelled this road in a barouche, one bright summer afternoon, with his handsome young wife by his side, and the bells of three parish-churches ringing their joy-peal in honour of his coming. He remembered what a folly and a mockery the joy-bells had seemed; and how very little nearer and dearer his wife’s beauty had been to him than the beauty of a picture seen and admired in one hour, to be forgotten in the next. “I think I was once in love,” he said to himself, when he meditated on the mistakes and follies of his past life. “Yes, I believe that I was once in love--fondly, foolishly, deeply in love. But it came to an end--too soon, perhaps. In his youth a man has so many dreams, and the newest always seems the brightest. Well, they are all over--dreams and follies; the end has come at last, and it is rather dreary. I suppose I have no right to complain. I have lived my life. There are men who seem in the very heyday of existence at fifty years of age; but those are not men who have taken life as I have taken it. It is the old story of the candle burnt at both ends. The illumination is very grand, but the candle suffers.”