At last the front door closed, and Mr. Dale and Mr. Denner walked silently down the lane in the starlight, the lawyer's little heart beating so with excitement, that he had a suffocated feeling, and once or twice put his hand to his throat, as though to loosen his muffler. Mr. Dale, still absorbed in his first edition, took swinging strides, the tails of his brown cloth overcoat flapping and twisting about his long, thin legs. Mr. Denner had now and then almost to break into a trot to keep up with him. Mr. Dale walked with his hands clasped behind him, and his stick under his arm; his soft felt hat was pulled down over his eyes, so that his keeping the path was more by chance than sight. He stopped once to pluck a sprig from the hawthorn hedge, to put between his lips. This gave Mr. Denner breath, and a chance to speak. "I think I will walk home with you, Henry," he said. "I want to have a talk with you." His heart thumped as he said that; he felt he had committed himself. "Well, now, that's very pleasant," responded Mr. Dale. "I was just thinking I should be alone half the way home." "But you would not be alone when you got there," Mr. Denner said meditatively; "now, with me it is different." "Oh, quite different,--quite different." "Yes," proceeded the other, "I have very little companionship. I go home and sit in my library all by myself. Sometimes, I get up and wander about the house, with only my cigar for company." "I suppose," said Mr. Dale, "that you can smoke wherever you want, in your house? I often think of your loneliness; coming and going just as you please, quite independently." Mr. Denner gave him a sudden questioning look, and then appeared to reproach himself for having misunderstood his friend. "Yes, just so,--just so. I knew you would appreciate it; but you can never know from experience, Henry, how a man feels left quite to himself. You do not think of the independence; it is the loneliness. You cannot know that." "No," murmured Mr. Dale, "perhaps not, but I can imagine it." When they reached the iron gate of Dale house, they followed the trim path across the lawn to the north side of the house, where it ended in a little walk, three bricks wide, laid end to end, and so damp with perpetual shade, they were slippery with green mould, and had tufts of moss between them. Mr. Dale's study was in a sort of half basement one went down two steps to reach the doorway, and the windows, set in thick stone walls and almost hidden in a tangle of wistaria, were just above the level of the path.