"I meditate, George, I meditate in a charming rural retreat which I possess in the green heart of Devonshire. There I spend leafy days in pastoral seclusion. I have my plane tree, my jug of old Falernian. I have my spaniel, Lalage, and an impoverished female cousin who performs very engagingly upon the spinet. I sit in the austere musick-chamber with shadowy white walls, empty save for two or three tall black oaken chairs and the curiously painted instrument. I listen to the cool melodies of Couperin and admire his unimpassioned symbols of the Passions where a purple domino is the most violent, the most fervid emotion. I hear above the chirping of the crickets, the faint harmonies of Archangelo Corelli and the fugues of Domenico Scarlatti, whose name is so vivid, but whose musick like the morning is a mist of gold. I sit in a library hung with faded rose brocades and tarnished silver broideries. There I meditate upon the bloody deaths of Emperors and the grey hairs of Helen of Troy. There I move serenely from shelf to shelf and hark to the muffled thunder of volumes clapped together to exclude the odorous dust. I ponder Religion and Urn Burial and pore over the lurid histories of notable comets. At dusk of a fine day, I step out into the dewy garden to watch the colour fade from the flowers and the stars wink in the lucent green of the western sky. Presently I step indoors, light a tall wax candle set in a silver candlestick, go sedately to bed and fall asleep to the perfume of roses and jasmine and the echo of a cadence from the _Anatomy of Melancholy_." "And that is your life?" said Sir George. "That is my life." "William, would it have been your life if things had been different on that April morning? I thought my life was as I would have wished to spend it; I have worshipped dull columns of figures and the dust of counting-houses, but to-night when I saw that child, when I saw that nephew of mine, I feared old age and wished I could somehow have thought less, calculated less, striven less, and loved more." "George," said Mr. Ripple, tapping the lid of his snuff box with not so brave an air as usual, and, as he spoke, his friend apprehended in a moment's illumination that all this decorated narrative had been evoked to defer an explanation which he had felt all the while was inevitable. "George," said Mr. Ripple, "if upon that morning in April, I could have made up my mind, I should, I believe, have--and yet I don't know," he broke off, "I doubt I was never intended to be a man of commonplace action." "You did not interfere?" "I loved her, too." "You loved her?"