When at last they parted under the multiplying lamps of the November twilight, he turned his face eastward. He was afraid of his mother's eyes--he scarcely knew why. He walked along Kensington Gore, and the clustering confused lights of street and house, white and golden and orange and pale lilac, the moving lamps and shining glitter of the traffic, the luminous interiors of omnibuses, the reflection of carriage and hoarding, the fading daylight overhead, the phantom trees to the left, the deepening shadows and blacknesses among the houses on his right, the bobbing heads of wayfarers, were just for him the stir and hue and texture of fairyland. All the world was fairyland. He went to his club and dined there, and divided the evening between geography, as it is condensed in Baedeker and Murray on North Italy, Italian Switzerland and the Italian Riviera, and a study of the marriage laws as they are expounded in "Whitaker's Almanac," the "Encyclopædia Britannica," and other convenient works of reference. He replaced the books as he used them, and went at last from the library into the smoking-room, but seeing a man who might talk to him there, he went out at once into the streets, and fetched a wide compass by Baker Street, Oxford Street, and Hyde Park, home. He was a little astonished at himself and everything. But it was going to be--splendid. (What poor things words can be!) § 5 He found his mother still up. She had been re-reading "The Old Wives' Tale," and she sat before a ruddy fire in the shadow beyond the lit circle of a green-shaded electric light thinking, with the book put aside. In the dimness above was his father's portrait. "Time you were in bed, mother," he said reprovingly, and kissed her eyebrow and stood above her. "What's the book?" he asked, and picked it up and put it down, forgotten. Their eyes met. She perceived he had something to say; she did not know what. "Where have you been?" she asked. He told her, and they lapsed into silence. She asked another question and he answered her, and the indifferent conversation ended again. The silence lengthened. Then he plunged: "I wonder, mother, if it would put you out very much if I brought home a wife to you?" So it had come to this--and she had not seen it coming. She looked into the glowing recesses of the fire before her and controlled her voice by an effort. "I'd be glad for you to do it, dear--if you loved her," she said very quietly. He stared down at her for a moment; then he knelt down beside her and took her hand and kissed it. "_My dear_," she whispered softly, stroking his head, and her tears came streaming. For a time they said no more. Presently he put coal on the fire, and then sitting on the hearthrug at her feet and looking away from her into the flames--in an attitude that took her back to his boyhood--he began to tell her brokenly and awkwardly of Marjorie.