Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green; groups of distant children or animals passed in and out of the golden light-spaces; the patches of heather left here and there glowed as the sunset touched them. Every now and then his eye travelled vaguely past a cottage garden, gay with the pinks and carmines of the phloxes, into the cool browns and bluish-grays of the raftered room beyond; babies toddled across the road, with stooping mothers in their train; the whole air and scene seemed to be suffused with suggestions of the pathetic expansiveness and helplessness of human existence, which, generation after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. Life after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into it again. And in the interval what agony, what disillusion! All the apparatus of a universe that men may know what it is to hope and fail, to win and lose! _Happy!_--in this world, 'where men sit and hear each other groan.' His friend's confidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job. What was it based on? In the first place, on Christianity--'on the passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,' said the dreaming spectator to himself, 'which at the first honest challenge of the critical sense withers in our grasp! That challenge Elsmere has never given it, and in all probability never will. No! A man sees none the straighter for having a wife he adores, and a profession that suits him, between him and unpleasant facts!' * * * * * In the evening Langham, with the usual reaction of his afternoon self against his morning self, felt that wild horses should not take him to Church again, and, with a longing for something purely mundane, he stayed at home with a volume of Montaigne, while apparently all the rest of the household went to evening service. After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy; the west was streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the wind was rising in the trees, and the temperature had suddenly fallen so much that when Langham shut himself up in Robert's study he did what he had been admonished to do in case of need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily into the darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and threw himself down into Robert's chair with a sigh of Sybaritic satisfaction. 'Good! Now for something that takes the world less naively,' he said to himself; 'this house is too virtuous for anything.' He opened his Montaigne and read on very happily for half an hour. The house seemed entirely deserted. 'All the servants gone too!' he said presently, looking up and listening. 'Anybody who wants the spoons needn't trouble about me. I don't leave this fire.' And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was a sound of the swing door which separated Robert's passage from the front hall opening and shutting. Steps came quickly towards the study, the handle was turned, and there on the threshold stood Rose.