The atmosphere of the house was inexpressibly poignant. Within its walls, he reflected, dwelt the ghost of all his childhood, and memories of his mother, that had lain submerged in his consciousness for many years, rose to meet him wherever he went. Well, he would never see the place again. This exile, it pleased him to think, was his final sacrifice to her memory. That was the best way in which he could express it. At the worst, another voice whispered, it was an excess of mawkish sentiment. All through the afternoon, and particularly when he disinterred small pieces of the lumber that he had collected in his schooldays, this sense of a ghostly childhood haunted him. It followed him down the stairs into the hall, where the grandfather clock ticked steadily as it had ticked ever since he could remember, into the dead drawing-room, soon to be made alive by the tastes of another feminine personality; on the lawn, where the limes were shedding their sticky bloom; on the way to the station, when he lugged his bag through the gnarled shadows of Mrs. Barrow’s ancient garden, and caught a glimpse of the old lady’s kindly nodding bonnet as she smiled at him from her place in the window, where she sat hermetically sealed in an atmosphere of Victorian decay. There were the reedy pools and Shenstone’s hanging woods, ghostly waters and woodlands, never to be seen again. And there was the platform of Halesby station, reeking of hot coal dust and ashes, and, from the incoming train, a flux of shabby people, including the bank-clerk in tennis flannels and the mysterious commercial traveller with the brown leather bag, reading the _Pink ’Un_ as he walked. From this, through the black-country’s familiar desert, the train carried him into the bitter reality of North Bromwich. With something approaching the feelings of an intruder he installed himself in W.G.’s diggings, and made a supper, undeniably pleasant, of bread and cheese with a large bottle of W.G.’s beer. The latter, which happened to be Astill’s XXXX, induced a mood of tolerant sleepiness, and luckily prepared him to receive, at midnight or thereabouts, the confidences of his friend on the subject of Sister Merrion’s intellectual charms. “You know, old chap, she’s different from me—reads poetry by the hour when she’s in the bunk on night duty. Longfellow’s her favourite. A long way above my head and all that; but it’s a wonderful thing, when you come to think of it, to be married to an intellectual woman. . . .” So the words poured into Edwin’s drowsy ears. He was far too sleepy to smile, and, Longfellow apart, it did seem to him a comfortable and even enviable thing to be the adored centre of the universe in the Irish eyes of a tender creature with wavy brown hair and a painful domestic tragedy. W.G. was still moralising on his past wickedness and the prospect of a blameless future when Edwin fell asleep. II