The secret of his content in that long leisurely ramble had been that repeatedly by a scarcely realised effort it had not lain in the direction of Widderstone. And now, as he sat hungrily devouring his breakfast on the table in the kitchen, with the daybreak comforting his eyes, he thought with a positive mockery of that poor old night-thing he had given inch by inch into the safe keeping of his pink and white drawing-room. Don Quixote, Poe, Rousseau—they were familiar but not very significant labels to a mind that had found very poor entertainment in reading. But they were at least representative enough to set him wondering which of their influences it was that had inflated with such a gaseous heroism the Lawford of the night before. He thought of Sheila with a not unkindly smile, and of the rest. ‘I wonder what they’ll do?’ had been a question almost as much in his mind during these last few hours as had ‘What am I to do?’ in the first bout of his ‘visitation.’ But the ‘they’ was not very precisely visualised. He saw Sheila, and Harry, and dainty pale-blue Bettie Lovat, and cautious old Wedderburn, and Danton, and Craik, and cheery, gossipy Dr Sutherland, and the verger, Mr Dutton, and Critchett, and the gardener, and Ada, and the whole vague populous host that keep one as definitely in one’s place in the world’s economy as a firm-set pin the camphored moth. What his place was to be only time could show. Meanwhile there was in this loneliness at least a respite. Solitude!—he bathed his weary bones in it. He laved his eyelids in it, as in a woodland brook after the heat of noon. He sat on in calmest reverie till his hunger was satisfied. Then, scattering out his last crumbs to the birds from the barred window, he climbed upstairs again, past his usual bedroom, past his detested guest room, up into the narrow sweetness of Alice’s, and flinging himself on her bed fell into a long and dreamless sleep. By ten next morning Lawford had bathed and dressed. And at half-past ten he got up from Sheila’s fat little French dictionary and his Memoirs to answer Mrs Gull’s summons on the area bell. The little woman stood with arms folded over an empty and capacious bag, with an air of sustained melancholy on her friendly face. She wished him a very nervous ‘Good morning,’ and dived down into the kitchen. The hours dragged slowly by in a silence broken only by an occasional ring at the bell. About three she emerged from the house and climbed the area steps with her bag hooked over her arm. He watched the little black figure out of sight, watched a man in a white canvas hat ascend the steps to push a blue-printed circular through the letter-box. It had begun to rain a little. He returned to the breakfast-room and with the window wide open to the rustling coolness of the leaves, edged his way very slowly across from line to line of the obscure French print.