Apparently no answer had been returned to his inquiry: he waited a little longer, with legs apart, and eyeballs enveloped in brooding darkness. ‘I’ll just go and tell the ladies you’re coming,’ he suddenly bawled down the hollow. ‘Do you hear, Craik? They’re alone, you know.’ And with that he resolutely wheeled and rapidly made his way down the steps into the garden. Some few moments afterwards Mr Craik shook himself free of the basement, hastened at a spirited trot to rejoin his companions, and in his absence of mind omitted to shut the front door. CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Lawford sat on in the darkness, and now one sentence and now another of their talk would repeat itself in his memory, in much the same way as one listlessly turns over an antiquated diary, to read here and there a flattened and almost meaningless sentiment. Sometimes a footstep passed echoing along the path under the trees, then his thoughts would leave him, and he would listen and listen till it had died quite out. It was all so very far away. And they too—these talkers—so very far away; as remote and yet as clear as the characters in a play when they have made their final bow, and have left the curtained stage, and one is standing uncompanioned and nearly the last of the spectators, and the lights that have summoned back reality again are being extinguished. It was only by painful effort of mind that he kept recalling himself to himself—why he was here; what it all meant; that this was indeed actuality. Yet, after all, this by now was his customary loneliness: there was little else he desired for the present than the hospitality of the dark. He glanced around him in the clear, black, stirless air. Here and there, it seemed, a humped or spindled form held against all comers its passive place. Here and there a tiny faintness of light played. Night after night these chairs and tables kept their blank vigil. Why, he thought, pleased as an overtired child with the fancy, in a sense they were always alone, shut up in a kind of senselessness—just like us all. But what—what, he had suddenly risen from his chair to ask himself—what on earth are they alone with? No precise answer had been forthcoming to that question. But as in turning in the doorway, he looked out into the night, flashing here and there in dark spaces of the sky above the withering apple leaves—the long dark wall and quiet untrodden road—with the tumultuous beating of the stars—one thing at least he was conscious of having learned in these last few days: he knew what kind of a place he was alone _in_.