As he still stood looking to the north through the window across that afternoon autumn air, with the majesty of the high trees framing his landscape, he heard a step he thought he knew. His attitude changed. He started round. It died away again. She was long in coming! He felt the chill of his place, and, sensitive to every slight impression of the body, long steeped in immediate enjoyment of every detail of luxury, he moved at once instinctively back to that chair before the fire and sat him down again; but this time leaning backwards, his arms on the arms of the gilded thing that supported him, and a deeper reverie in his eyes. The chestnut logs had caught; they made a murmuring which effaced time and were a sort of lullaby. For some few moments he did not know that he was waiting for a step and a voice, though they were those of a friend. For some few moments he did but dream, and there passed before his mind certain odd convictions which inhabited it, and certain common terrors; both of these stood against a background of disappointment and of nothingness.... None of his line could be lost ... none of his line could be lost.... St. Louis had baptized them all into a sort of security.... If only the poor were not oppressed, if only he were always master of the rich, and a true king, his soul would be at last secure.... Nor was he too much to blame. These awful and remote dignities of kingship must be counterweighted by something human; it was a crying need; and affection, though passing, was still affection.... There was no gallery of faces in his mind ... he had been good to all these women, and would be good to all to come. But there had now come upon him friendship. Though the particular love had passed and all its habits, friendship remained; and friendship, even to a man so jaded, was a profound thing. Even as he thus mused he heard the step which was unmistakable, and a particular voice greeting his gentlemen without salutations in the vestibule. That charming voice answered their respect without any insolence and yet with a certain frankness which was properly bred of a great, a thoroughly exalted place now long enjoyed. Then the tall white-and-gilt door was opened--one leaf of it--by a hand delicate and poised, shut at once, and he took her hands. Now at last he was at home, and for some few minutes the intolerable tedium, the inexorable weight of what life had come to be for him, would be lifted; the voice was enough for that, and the gestures, and the more than kindness of the face; the sympathy in everything of the senses, and common memories apparently unregretted, and permitting her apparently (he did not deceive himself, he believed it, though to her it was bitter enough), a powerful abandonment of the past.