For in good truth he needed refreshment, and that speedily, being very tired, fagged by long hours in the City, by heavy responsibilities, by the burden of the airless August heat, let alone those more intimate causes of disturbance already indicated. Iglesias could not disguise from himself that the close application to business was beginning to tell injuriously upon his health. This same morning, coming back from early Mass, passing through the flagged passage which leads from Kensington Palace Green into Church Street, he had become so faint from exhaustion, that reaching--and not without difficulty--his former home in Holland Street, he had summoned the neat bald-headed little caretaker and asked permission to enter the house and rest. The ground-floor rooms were cool and dusky, sheltered by closed shutters from the summer sun. Only the French-window of the back dining-room stood open, on to the flight of wrought-iron steps leading down into the garden. Beside it the caretaker, not without husky coughings, placed a kitchen chair for Iglesias and fetched him a glass of water. "I could wish I had something better to offer you, sir," he said, "but I am an abstainer by habit myself; and I have no liquor of any kind, unfortunately, in the house." The water, however, was pleasantly cold, and Dominic drank it thankfully. He could have fancied there was virtue in it--the virtue of things blessed by long-ago mother-love. And, thinking of that, his eyes filled with tears as he looked out over the small neglected garden. Of the once glorious laburnum there remained only an unsightly stump, but jasmine still clothed the enclosing walls, the dark green of its straggling shoots starred here and there with belated white blossoms. About the lip of the empty stone basin, vigorously chirruping, sparrows came and went, while in the far corner a grove of starveling sunflowers lifted their brown and yellow-rayed faces towards the light. Dominic, resting gratefully in the cool semi-darkness of the empty room, until the faintness which had attacked him was passed, found the place very gentle, soothing, and sweet. The sadder memories had died out here, so he noted. Only gracious and tender ones remained. He wished he could stay on indefinitely. As the years multiply, and the chequered story of them lengthens, it is comforting to dwell in a place where, once on a time, one had been greatly loved. Dominic turned to the waiting caretaker, who regarded him with mingled solicitude, admiration, and deference. "So the house is still unlet?" he said. "Yes, sir, and is likely to remain so, I apprehend. The lease, as I understand, falls in a very few years hence, and the landlord is unwilling to make any outlay on the house, which will probably then be pulled down; while no tenant, I opine, would be willing to rent a residence so wanting in modern decoration and modern conveniences. Weeks pass, sir, without any persons calling to view."