At any rate he would rub shoulders with his fellow-creatures once more. That, perhaps, was not the least that induced him to the purpose. He most piously longed to shake off, if only for an hour, that sense of sombre isolation that had lain on him from his first coming, like a dark fatality. “You can go,” he said sharply; and fell to musing again. His meal was served by Darda. If, in her half-crazed consciousness, she resented, with a swollen, passionate heart, the cruel order that had deprived her at a blow of the chief fantastic interest of her broken life, she had disciplined herself already to give no sign of it. No doubt her brother, forced to be the instrument of a harsh despotism, had appealed to her by love of himself to control the emotion that, expressed, could only read their ruin. No doubt, also, the sense of bitter wrong driven down, would by and by stimulate certain nerves of action that had hitherto slumbered unrecognized. She moved to and fro with set lips and white face and shot no single glance in the direction of her master. The womanly instinct for grace and neatness, that not the most debased intellect altogether foregoes, led her to give what order to the arrangement of the meal its poor accessories allowed. When all was finished, she went softly from the room and closed the door. Mr. Tuke did not permit a certain pity in his heart for this tender bud he had so lacerated to interfere with his appetite. But, his dinner over, he fell, as men will, to a more genial view of circumstances, and, as he sipped his wine, was inclined to regret his precipitancy of the morning. “Yet, after all,” he thought, “the monstrosities were incompatible with any forms of feminine attractiveness, and she will soon learn to find her pleasure in more wholesome interests.” He laughed, reviewing the items of the hideous collection. “From the gallows!” quoth he. “And a relic of twenty years standing! And did she let the rest of the good gentleman lie--only plucking the head, like a withered medlar, from the stalk it dropped with? I am made a receiver of stolen property, by Gad--Herodias to some bloody cut-purse! What a dreary-minded wench, and what a pretty!” The sweet old wine flushed his brain with a glamour of roses. He was inclined to take a more humorous view of his state and position. No doubt, withheld for the time being from considerations of worldliness, he felt that relapse from reclaimed barbarism which, coming to us all in certain moods and before certain aspects of nature, restores us momentarily to the primitive joy in life untamed and unmalignant, that is our proper heritage. After all, it is not for the trimmed parterres of existence to yield those glad surprises that are the basis of our yearning to the immortal. Who ever, wandering in an ordered garden, lost himself in a luminous mist of paganism?