As they went, Mr Barnett spoke twice. The first thing he said was: “You should have a drive up herein. So a carriage can come. There is no good if a carriage cannot come.” When he had said this, some rapid process of thought led him to another topic, and he continued: “Your father is a very fônny man.” Cosmo although he had received so much wider a training than his father, retained a trace, perhaps hereditary, of those conventions which I have already condemned. He felt the colour come into his face; but the darkness screened him, and his knowledge of the world restored him his balance in a moment. “He’ll be all right,” he said cheerfully. He opened the carriage door (not without the thanks of his chief) and tenderly arranged a warm rug around Mr Barnett’s knees. The young man in livery, hired for such purposes, stood by in somnolent respect. Then they bade each other good-night, and the last word Cosmo heard that evening as he turned back towards the house was the great and comforting word “Hôme,” rolled out by Mr Barnett to his servant in the accent of command. When Cosmo had re-entered the house and approached, with great reluctance, the room whose atmosphere still seemed full of failure, he found that his father had gone to bed, and he was glad; for, like most men possessed of wisdom, he trusted half his fortunes to the influence of other men’s sleep. * * * * * If the effect of a misunderstanding or a quarrel were immediate, with what rapidity would not the tragedies of the world develop! With what certitude could one not foresee, and perhaps provide against, the climax of an evil fortune. If things led on from logical step to step, what simple stories would crowd the world. Then indeed the epic and the lyrical, which we perpetually seek in fiction, would divert us in the common affairs of our own lives. But the real world around us, the world one corner of which it is here my business to describe, is not arranged in that fashion. A crime, a miscalculation, will produce consequences, not immediate but ultimate. Suspicions confirmed, quarrels brought perhaps to the point of violence, seem rather to sink into the mind and to make a soil there, than to bear their full fruit at once; so that, when the catastrophe falls, it is commonly at an insignificant and nearly always at an unsuspected moment. So it was with what I can only call the tragedy of my friend.