Arthur stood looking at the closed door with the frightened eyes of a woman. He looked round at the familiar objects of his room--the futile little gimcracks with which he had surrounded an existence worthy of such environments--the invitation cards on the draped mantelpiece, the little glass vases of fantastic shape with a single bloom of stephanotis, the hundred and one fantasies of a finicking generation wherein Art sappeth Manhood. And his eyes were suddenly opened to a new world of things which he could not do. He gazed--not without a vague shame--into a perspective of incompetencies. In the _laissez-aller_ of the unreflective he had assumed that life would be a continuance of small pleasures and refined enjoyments, little dinners and pleasant converse, Dora and a comfortable home, mutual mild delight in flowers and table decoration. Into this assumption Seymour Michael had suddenly stepped--strong, restless, and mysterious--and Arthur became uneasily conscious of possibilities. There might be something in his own life, there might even be something within himself, over which he could have no control. There was something within himself--something connected with the man who had gone, leaving unrest behind him, as he left it wherever he passed. What was this? whither would it lead? Arthur Agar rang the bell, and kept the “gyp” in the room on some trivial pretext. He was afraid of solitude. CHAPTER XVII TWO MOTIVES Making vain pretence Of gladness, with an awful sense Of one mute shadow watching all. “Pooh! the girl is happy enough!” Mr. Glynde jerked his newspaper up and read an advertisement of steamships about to depart to the West Coast of Africa. His wife--engaged in cutting out a scarlet flannel garment of diminutive proportions (an operation which she made a point of performing on the study table)--gave two gentle snips and ceased her occupation. She looked at the back of her husband's head, where the hair was getting a little thin, and said nothing. No one argued with the Reverend Thomas Glynde. “The girl is happy enough,” he repeated, seeking contradiction. There are times when an autocrat would very much like to be argued with. “She is always lively and gay,” he continued defiantly. “Too gay,” Mrs. Glynde whispered to the scissors, with a flash of the only wisdom which Heaven gives away, and it is not given to all mothers. The winter had closed over Stagholme, the isolating, distance-making winter of English country life, wherein each house is thrown upon its own resource, and the peaceful are at rest because their neighbours cannot get at them.