Then she returned to her brother’s house, and for an hour or two Lucian and his old tutor talked of things nearest to their hearts, and the feelings of home came upon the younger man more strongly than ever. He began to wonder how it was that he had settled down in London when he might have lived in the country; the atmosphere of this quiet, book-lined room in a village parsonage was, he thought just then, much more to his true taste than that in which he had spent the last few years of his life. At Oxford Lucian had lived the life of a book-worm and a dreamer: he was not a success in examinations, and he brought no great honour upon his tutor. In most respects he had lived apart from other men, and it was not until the publication of his first volume had drawn the eyes of the world upon him that he had been swept out of the peaceful backwater of a student’s existence into the swirling tides of the full river of life. Then had followed Lord Simonstower’s legacy, and then the runaway marriage with Haidee, and then four years of butterfly existence. He began to wonder, as he ate the vicar’s well-kept mutton, fed on the moorlands close by, and sipped the vicar’s old claret, laid down many a year before, whether his recent life had not been a feverish dream. Looked at from this peaceful retreat, its constant excitement and perpetual rush and movement seemed to have lost whatever charm they once had for him. Unconsciously Lucian was suffering from reaction: his moral as well as his physical nature was crying for rest, and the first oasis in the desert assumed the delightful colours and soft air of Paradise. Later in the evening he walked over to the farmhouse, through softly falling snow, to inquire after his uncle’s condition. Mrs. Chilverstone was in the sick man’s room and did not come downstairs; Miss Pepperdine received him in the parlour. In spite of the trouble that had fallen upon the house and of the busy day which she had spent, Keziah was robed in state for the evening, and she sat bolt upright in her chair plying her knitting-needles as vigorously as in the old days which Lucian remembered so well. He sat down and glanced at Simpson Pepperdine’s chair, and wished the familiar figure were occupying it, and he talked to his aunt of her brother’s illness, and the cloud which hung over the house weighed heavily upon both. ‘I am glad you came down, Lucian,’ said Miss Pepperdine, after a time. ‘I have been wanting to talk to you.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What about?’ Keziah’s needles clicked with unusual vigour for a moment or two. ‘Simpson,’ she said at last, ‘was always a soft-hearted man. If he had been harder of heart, he would have been better off.’ Lucian, puzzled by this ambiguous remark, stared at Miss Pepperdine in a fashion indicative of his amazement.