He himself had been so stunned and bewildered by the loss which had fallen upon him, that, when he found himself alone and out of doors again, he was for a while scarcely able to think consecutively about it. He walked along conscious for some time of nothing but a sort of dumb physical congeniality in the sunshine, in the clear blue and white of the sky, in the cheerful distinctness and sharpness of every outline. And then, little by little, the cheated grief reasserted itself, the numbed senses woke into painful life, and he fell into broken musings on the past, or into a bitter wonder over the precarious tenure by which men hold those good things whereon, so long as they are still their own, they are so quick to rear an edifice of optimist philosophy. A week before, his sister's affection had been to him the one sufficient screen between his own consciousness and the desolate threatening immensities of thought and of existence. The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be rushing in upon him. And still, life had to be lived, work to be got through, duties to be faced. How is it done? he kept vaguely wondering. How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and possession after possession swept away, and still find the years tolerable and the sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to century the invincible motive power of the race? Presently--by virtue of long critical and philosophical habit--his mind brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator. The introspective temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally turned outward--towards other people, towards books, towards intellectual interests. But self-study had had its charm for him of late, and, amongst other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an onlooker--a bystander. Society, old and new, men and women of the past and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of his own,--these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes, which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity. But his interest in his particular _rôle_ had been comparatively weak, and in analysing other individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.