For Barebone, France and his quest there, the Marquis de Gemosac, Dormer Colville, Juliette, lapsed into a sort of dream, while Farlingford remained a quiet reality. Loo had not written to Dormer Colville. Captain Clubbe was trading between Alexandria and Bristol. "The Last Hope" was not to be expected in England before April. To communicate with Colville would be to turn that past dream, not wholly pleasant, into a grim reality. Loo therefore put off from day to day the evil moment. By nature and by training he was a man of action. He tried to persuade himself that he was made for a scholar and would be happy to pass the rest of his days in the study of that history which had occupied Septimus Marvin's thoughts during a whole lifetime. Perhaps he was right. He might have been happy enough to pass his days thus if life were unchanging; if Septimus Marvin should never age and never die; if Miriam should be always there, with her light touch on the deeper thoughts, her half-French way of understanding the unspoken, with her steady friendship which might change, some day, into something else. This was, of course, inconsistent. Love itself is the most inconsistent of all human dreams; for it would have some things change and others remain ever as they are. Whereas nothing stays unchanged for a single day: love, least of all. For it must go forward or back. "See!" cried Septimus Marvin, one evening, laying his hand on the open book before him. "See how strong are racial things. Here are the Bourbons for ever shutting their eyes to the obvious, for ever putting off the evil moment, for ever temporising--from father to son, father to son; generation after generation. Finally we come to Louis XVI. Read his letters to the Comte d'Artois. They are the letters of a man who knows the truth in his own heart and will not admit it even to himself." "Yes," admitted Loo. "Yes--you are right. It is racial, one must suppose." And he glanced at Miriam, who did not meet his eyes but looked at the open page, with a smile on her lips half sad, wholly tolerant. Next morning, Loo thought, he would write to Dormer Colville. But the following evening came, and he had not done so. He went, as usual, to the rectory, where the same kind welcome awaited him. Miriam knew that he had not written. Like him, she knew that an end of some sort must soon come. And the end came an hour later. Some day, Barebone knew, Dormer Colville would arrive. Every morning he half looked for him on the sea-wall, between "The Black Sailor" and the rectory garden. Any evening, he was well aware, the smiling face might greet him in the lamp-lit drawing-room. Sep had gone to bed earlier that night. The rector was reading aloud an endless collection of letters, from which the careful student could scarcely fail to gather side-lights on history. Both Miriam and Loo heard the clang of the iron gate on the sea-wall.