Nor was I in any need of a constant companion. Since Rose’s marriage I had tended more and more to eremitical consolations—to my prints and gardening—whenever my patients permitted me. Nor was the personnel of the place of the kind that it had been when Rose’s mother had come “for good.” In those days, as I have told—and very likely told twice—I had old Hannah to help me. But Hannah was now a rheumatically crippled paying-guest at Lowestoft who could do nothing for me even if I again lured her forth. And the march of progress had established a cash chemist near enough to my rounds to lead me to give up dispensing, and so there was no longer Wellicum for the new Rose to help and hinder and besiege with questions. The same march, in another department of its attack upon the goodness and oldness of the days that are gone, had substituted a motor-car for my horses and traps, and so there was also no groom for Rose to help and hinder and besiege with questions. There was a chauffeur, it is true, but a man who has to do with machinery does not compare, as guide, philosopher and friend of small inquiring persons, with a man who has the care of horses. A gardener I still had, though Briggs was dead; and neighbours, among them Mrs. O’Gorman, now getting on in years, but with all her faculties; and some kind of a spurious, inferior Hannah could be obtained; and if Rose liked animals she could be provided both with a pony and a boy to look after it. None the less, it was a great problem and I had very serious doubts; yet I knew I should say yes. And I should say it with the more confidence because of Suzanne. Suzanne was my sheet-anchor. It is true that I could not consider her attitude to the elopement very sound: it was indeed far too lenient; but I seemed to be surrounded by old women with advanced sympathies (perhaps all old women at heart side with love’s rebels?), and Suzanne’s profound affection for Rose’s mother could not but make her careful over the little girl. But as we get older we become more self-protective; so I gave no promise, but shook hands with Eustace and said that I would think it all over and let him know in the morning what I decided. Upon this promise he permitted me, to my great joy, to go, at a very late hour to bed. My last waking thought was one of satisfaction that he had not, at any rate, said anything about band-beating. * * * * * If we are all to be arraigned at the Judgment Seat and put finally in our places, why not wait till then? Let God dispense favour and disfavour, rewards and punishments, that being His _métier_, and meanwhile let me be unjudicial and kind. That had been for so long my creed that I was staggered when, not long after, Ronnie’s father, with whom I had been on amicable, neighbourly terms for years, and with whose interior I was too intimately acquainted, cut me dead in the post office.