But he needed little persuasion to stay at least one night. The prospect of that long solitary walk, of that tired stupid stooping figure dragging itself along the interminable country roads seemed a sheer impossibility. ‘It is not—it isn’t, I swear it—the other that keeps me back,’ he had solemnly assured the friend that half smiled her relief at his acceptance, ‘but—if you only knew how empty it’s all got now; all reason gone even to go on at all.’ ‘But doesn’t it follow? Of course it’s empty. And now life is going to begin again. I assure you it is, I do indeed. Only, only have courage—just the will to win on.’ He said good-night; shut-to the latched door of his long low room, ceilinged with rafters close under the steep roof, its brown walls hung with quiet, dark, pondering and beautiful faces looking gravely across at him. And with his candle in his hand he sat down on the bedside. All speculation was gone. The noisy clock of his brain had run down again. He turned towards the old oval looking-glass on the dressing-table without the faintest stirring of interest, suspense, or anxiety. What did it matter what a man looked like—a now familiar but enfeebled and deprecating voice seemed to say. He knew that a change had come. Even Sheila had noticed it. And since then what had he not gone through? What now was here seemed of little moment, so far at least as this world was concerned. At last with an effort he rose, crossed the uneven floor, and looked in unmovedly on what was his own poor face come back to him: changed indeed almost beyond belief from the sleek self-satisfied genial yet languid Arthur Lawford of the past years, and still haunted with some faint trace of the set and icy sharpness, and challenge, and affront of the dark Adventurer, but that—how immeasurably dimmed and blunted and faded. He had expected to find it so. Would it (the thought vanished across his mind) would it have been as unmistakably there had he come hot-foot, fearing, expecting to find the other? But—was he disappointed! He hardly knew how long he stood there, leaning on his hands, surveying almost listlessly in the candle-light that lined, bedraggled, grey, hopeless countenance, those dark-socketed, smouldering eyes, whose pupils even now were so dilated that a casual glance would have failed to detect the least hint of any iris. ‘It must have been something pretty bad you were, you know, or something pretty bad you did,’ they seemed to be trying to say to him, ‘to drag us down to this.’