Westmacott regarded me without surprise, scarcely with interest. He appeared cold and quite indifferent, entirely in possession of his faculties. I grew ashamed under his dispassionate gaze, my laughter ceased, and I laid the pieces of plate on the table. Then it occurred to me we were waiting for something. The movement overhead had died away, but as I listened I heard steps upon the stair, several sets of steps, light pattering steps as of children, and heavier steps, as of a grown person. Then Westmacott stirred; he went across the room and opened the door. I saw Ruth standing in the passage with her children. She was hatless as she had arrived, but the glow of the lamp, hanging suspended from the ceiling, where it fell upon the curve of her little head, drew a line of light as upon a chestnut. Westmacott nodded curtly, passed out, and his family followed him in a passive and mournful procession. I watched them go, across the little garden, through the swing-gate, and into the dusky fields beyond. They seemed to me infinitely gray, infinitely dreary, infinitely broken, the personages of a flat and faded fresco. All that pulsating passion had passed, like an allegory of life, leaving only death behind. Gone was the vital flame from the human clay. And nothing had come of it, nothing but a broken plate. What ever comes of men’s efforts, I thought bitterly? so little, that we ought to take for our criterion of success, not the tangible result, but the intangible ardour by which the attempt is prompted. So rarely is the one the gauge of the other! I looked again at the little train rapidly disappearing into the darkness, a funeral cortège, carrying with it the corpse of slain rebellion. I saw the years of their future, a vista so stark, so arid, that I physically recoiled from its contemplation. How hideous would be the existence of those children, suffering perpetually from a constraint they could not explain, a constraint which lacked even to the elements of terror, so dead a thing was it, in which terror, a lively, vivid reality, could find no place. Death and stagnation would be their lot. The darkness of the fields had now completely swallowed them up, but I still stood looking at the spot where I had last seen them, and saying a final good-bye to the tale that place had unfolded to me. This time, I was certain, no sequel was still to come. On the morrow I should leave the Pennistans’ roof, with no hope that an echo of the strangely cursed, ill-fated, unconscious family would ever reach me again in the outer world.