For I felt as well as thought; and feeling is more dangerous than thought because at once more intimate and more intangible. A great emptiness filled--for emptiness can fill, just as silence can shout, and that hideously--not only my own soul but, as it seemed, all Nature around me. The land was empty, the sky empty. An east-wind blight spread abroad, taking all colour out of the landscape and warmth out of the sunshine. Just so had my parting with Nellie cast a blight over me, taking the colour and warmth out of my life. For I had been with her long enough for her presence, the sound of her voice, and constant sight of her to become a habit. How terribly I missed, and should continue to miss, her--not only in great matters but in small, in all the pleasant, trivial, friendly incidents of every day! After the freshness and spotless cleanliness of Westrea, my college rooms--fond though I was of them--looked dingy and uncared for, as is too often the way of an exclusively masculine dwelling-place. The men had not come up yet, which spared me the annoyance of Halidane’s neighbourhood for the moment. Still I felt the depressing lack of life and movement throughout the college buildings and quadrangles. Cambridge was asleep--a dull and dismal sleep, as it struck me. The Master, I found, was back and at the Lodge once more; but, since only a portion of the house was ready for habitation, Mrs. Dynevor and her daughters would remain at Bath for some weeks longer. This I was glad to hear, as it promised to simplify my rather awkward task. I called at the Lodge the same evening, to be received by the Master with his usual cordiality. He invited me to stay and dine, admitting he felt somewhat lonely without his ladies in the still partially dismantled house. ‘Unlike the three children in the Babylonian furnace, the smell of fire is very much upon it still,’ he said. ‘Signs and odours of destruction meet me at every turn. I dare say in the end--for I have an excellent architect--we shall make a more comfortable and certainly more sanitary place of it than ever before; but the continuity is broken, much history and many a tradition lost for good. I am only heartily glad you are not among the latter, Brownlow. It was a very near thing.’ Whether this was intended to give me an opening for explanation, I could not say. In any case I did not choose to take advantage of it, preferring to explain at my own time and in my own way. We talked on general subjects for a while. But at the end of dinner, when the butler left the room, he said, eyeing me with a twinkle-- ‘It was a pity you could not manage to meet us at Bath, Brownlow, for you would have found some old friends there. One of whom, a very splendid personage by the same token, made many gracious inquiries after you--put me through the longer catechism in respect of you, and put my sister and nieces through it also, I understand.’