Another five years passed, and then three, making eight more on top of the first ten. Major Foxmaster was crowding seventy; he looked eighty. Men and women who had been children when he moved out from Virginia were themselves almost face to face with impending middle age and had children of their own growing up, who, in their turn, would hear the story of Major Foxmaster's shadow and bear it forward into yet another generation. The stone copings above the Gaunt House door were sooty black with the accretions of decades; for this was a soft-coal town, and factories, with tall chimneys that constantly vomited out greasy black smoke, had crept up, taking the old hotel by flank and by rear. The broken shade in the right-hand lower front window of the old Gresham place, across the way, was gone altogether, having parted its rotted fabric from its decayed fastenings; so the bleak, bare face of the house winked with one dead eye and stared with the other. The crotchety bay mare was long gone to the bone yard. Her hide was chair bottoms and her gristles were glue; and out on the trotting track wealthy young bloods of the town exercised her get and her skittish grand-get. The Major did not drive a harness nag any more--he had a palsy of the hands and a stoop of the spine; but in most regards he adhered to the old habits. He took his daily constitutionals--sometimes alone--except, of course, for the tagging black shape behind him--oftener with the octogenarian Sherwan; and of evenings he played his poker games at the Kenilworth Club, which, after the way of ultraconservative clubs, stood fast on its original site, even though the neighbourhood about it was so distressfully altered. His heels had quit ringing against the sidewalk; instead, his legs lifted tremulously and his feet felt for a purchase on the earth when he set them down. His face was no longer chipped grey flint; it was a chalk-white, with deep lines in it. The gold-headed cane of ebony wood, which he carried always, had ceased to be an ornament to his gait and had become a necessary prop to his step. His jaws sagged in until there were deep recesses at the corners of his mouth; and there, in those little hollow places, the spittle would accumulate in tiny patches. Possibly, by reason of the bleary casts that had overspread them, his eyes--still the faithfully inscrutable peepholes of his brain--gave no betrayal of the racking thoughts behind them. They were racking thoughts too. The delusion was a mania now--a besetting mania, feeding on silence and isolation, colouring and tincturing all the processes of his intellect.