It seemed to weave a spell over him, to call up a nostalgia he had lost all remembrance of since childhood. And that queer homesickness, at any rate, was all Sabathier’s doing, he thought, smiling in his rather careworn fashion. Sabathier! It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness alike were only really appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave. Just with one’s lantern lit, on the edge of the whispering unknown, and a reiterated going back out of the solitude into the light and warmth, to the voices and glancing of eyes, to say good-bye:—that after all was this life on earth for those who watched as well as acted. What if one’s earthly home were empty?—still the restless fretted traveller must tarry; ‘for the horrible worst of it is, my friend,’ he said, as if to some silent companion listening behind him, ‘the worst of it is, _your_ way was just simply, solely suicide.’ What was it Herbert had called it? Yes, a cul-de-sac—black, lofty, immensely still and old and picturesque, but none the less merely a contemptible cul-de-sac; no abiding place, scarcely even sufficing with its flagstones for a groan from the fugitive and deluded refugee. There was no peace for the wicked. The question of course then came in—Was there any peace anywhere, for anybody? He smiled at a sudden odd remembrance of a quiet, sardonic old aunt whom he used to stay with as a child. ‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ she would say, peering at him over his favourite pudding. His eyes rested vacantly on the darkling street. He fell again into reverie, gigantically brooded over by shapes only imagination dimly conceived of: the remote alleys of his mind astir with a shadowy and ceaseless traffic which it wasn’t at least _this_ life’s business to hearken after, or regard. And as he stood there in a mysteriously thronging peaceful solitude such as he had never known before, faintly out of the silence broke the sound of approaching hoofs. His heart seemed to gather itself close; a momentary blindness veiled his eyes, so wildly had his blood surged up into cheek and brain. He remained, caught up, with head slightly inclined, listening, as, with an interminable tardiness, measureless anguished hope died down into nothing in his mind. Cold and heavy, his heart began to beat again, as if to catch up those laggard moments. He turned with an infinite revulsion of feeling to look out on the lamps of the old fly that had drawn up at his gate.