Neither Rachel nor her father had realised all this; but the mother with her acuter sensibilities had known, and had so deliberately set herself to fulfil her task that they had all these years been interpreted to one another, as it were, by that other influence that had surrounded them, that atmosphere through which everything was seen aright and in its most beautiful aspect. And the time came when Sir William suddenly grasped with a burning, startling vividness the fact that his life could not be the same again, that he must henceforth take it on a lower plane. The day was fine and bright--too warm, too bright; the hopeful light of spring had given place to the steady glare of summer. He had been used before to go out riding with Rachel in the early morning, in order to be back by the time Lady Gore was ready to begin her day. They had tacitly abandoned this habit now. Then one day it occurred to Sir William that it might be a good thing for Rachel to resume it. He proposed to her that they should go out as they used. She, in her inmost heart shrinking from it, but thinking it would be a satisfaction to him, agreed. He, shrinking from it as much as she did, thought to please her. And so they went out and rode silently side by side, overpowered by mute comparison of this day with days that had been. And when they got home they went each their own way, and made no attempt at exchanging words. Sir William went miserably to his study, his heart aching with a rush of almost unbearable sorrow as he thought of the bright little room upstairs to which he had been wont to hurry for the welcome that always awaited him. What should he do with his life? How should he fill it? he asked himself in a burst of grief, as he shut himself in. And so much had the theory, firmly believed in by himself and his wife, that he had by his own free will, and in order to devote his life to her, abandoned any quest of a public career become an absolute conviction in his mind, that he felt a dull resentment at having been so noble. He recognised now that it had been quixotic. He had let the time pass. Fifty-five! To be sure, in these days it is not old age; it may, indeed, under certain circumstances be the prime of life, for a man who has begun his career early, political or otherwise. Had this been Sir William's lot he could have sought some consolation, or at any rate alleviation, in his misfortune, by turning at once to his work and plunging into it more strenuously than before. But even that mitigation, for so much as it might be worth, was denied to him. And he sat there, trying to face the fact that seemed almost incredible to a man of what seemed to him his aptitudes and capacity, the awful fact that he had not enough to do to fill up his life. He did not state this pitiless truth to himself explicitly, but it was beginning to loom from behind a veil, and he would some day be forced to look at it. He could not start anything fresh. He had not the requisite