Evening began to shine between the trees; they seemed to stand aflame, with a melancholy rapture in their uplifted boughs above their fading coats. The fields of the garnered harvest shone with a golden stillness, awhir with shimmering flocks of starlings. And the old birds that had sung in the spring sang now amid the same leaves, grown older too to give them harbourage. Herbert was sitting in his room when they returned, nursing his teacup on his knee while he pretended to be reading, with elbow propped on the table. ‘Here’s Nicholas Sabathier, my dear, come to say goodbye awhile,’ said Grisel. She stood for a moment in her white gown, her face turned towards the clear green twilight of the open window. ‘I have promised to walk part of the way with him. But I think first we must have some tea. No; he flatly refuses to be driven. We are going to walk.’ The two friends were left alone, face to face with a rather difficult silence, only the least degree of nervousness apparent, so far as Herbert was concerned, in that odd aloof sustained air of impersonality that had so baffled his companion in their first queer talk together. ‘Your sister said just now, Herbert,’ blurted Lawford at last. ‘“Here’s Nicholas Sabathier come to say good-bye” well, I—what I want you to understand is that it _is_ Sabathier, the worst he ever was; but also that it _is_ “good-bye.”’ Herbert slowly turned. ‘I don’t quite see why “goodbye,” Lawford. And—frankly, there is nothing to explain. We have chosen to live such a very out-of-the-way life,’ he went on, as if following up a train of thought.... ‘The truth is if one wants to live at all—one’s own life, I mean—there’s no time for many friends. And just steadfastly regarding your neighbour’s tail as you follow it down into the Nowhere—it’s that that seems to me the deadliest form of hypnotism. One must simply go one’s own way, doing one’s best to free one’s mind of cant—and I dare say clearing some excellent stuff out with the rubbish. One consequence is that I don’t think, however foolhardy it may be to say so, I don’t think I care a groat for any opinion as human as my own, good or bad. My sister’s a million times a better woman than I am a man. What possibly could there be, then, for me to say?’ He turned with a nervous smile. ‘Why should it be good-bye?’ Lawford glanced involuntarily towards the door that stood in shadow duskily ajar. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘we have talked, and we think it must be that, until, at least,’ he smiled faintly, ‘I can come as quietly as your old ghost you told me of; and in that case it may not be so very long to wait.’