Lucy would have been free to accept, or refuse, that honest offering. He did not know that she would have accepted it--but there had been moments in which his hopes had risen almost to certainty--only to be cast down again into more miserable depths. Thus the two to whom honour and duty ranked highest were kept apart, and might be kept apart all their lives--while the two who thought but little of either (was not this hard upon Arthur?) played with the happiness they had snatched in defiance of duty, and threw it away. Durant may be pardoned, all things considered, for these hard thoughts; for, modest as he was, hope had been high in his breast when he conducted Lucy to her brother’s wedding. But gradually, bit by bit, that hope had ebbed away. He had thought of winning her family’s favour by his devotion to their service. He had thought that their familiar friendship with him might have balanced the humbleness of his birth--he had once thought his money, now lost, might tell for something. But all had worked against him instead of for him; while Arthur who had got the happiness he wanted, the desire of his heart, had thrown it away. These thoughts filled his mind as he walked through the streets of Underhayes. He went to the little house in which the Bates’ had lived, from which it seemed impossible to believe that the flavour of the early dinners and the evening rum and water could have faded away. When lovely things are carried hence by death, the vacancy is less strange almost, less poignant than when that tragi-comic strain of grim amusement comes in, and we feel that things so earthy, things having no affinity with a higher sphere, have come under its sublimating touch. Could anything have made the tax-collector’s evening potations approach solemnity? and yet there was a kind of awe in the recollection of all those vulgar circumstances gone with the vulgar being to whom they belonged into the darkness--into the unknown which is not vulgar. Death is more akin to the noble and beautiful than it is to the paltry and commonplace. It is not unnatural that those should die and be translated into the sphere to which their finer impulses belong; but _these_, what have they to do with dying, with heaven and hell and the unseen? This was what Durant felt as he looked with a kind of strange pity into the room, now occupied by a young mother with her little children. “All messages is to go to Raisins the grocer,” she said, opening the familiar door. It seemed to Durant impossible that Arthur was not there seated with Nancy upon the old haircloth sofa, within; but he met the haircloth sofa a little further on, standing out in the damp at a broker’s door; and Arthur and Nancy, where were they? never, it would seem, likely to sit together again.