This story has almost the gait of history. I have to sum up decades in a phrase. It is really the span of one man’s whole life that I am covering, you see. But have patience with me while I skim the intervening voids, and hover meticulously over the vivid patches of detail.... It was some two years before I reached Braythe. I don’t remember particularly what went on during those two years; I only know that I was a happy wanderer. I was always a happy wanderer, it seems to me as I look back on life, except for the times when I sank by Lithway’s side into his lethargy--a lucid lethargy, in which unaccountable things happened very quietly, with an utter stillness of context. I do know that I was planning a hunting-trip in British Central Africa, and wrote Lithway that I had better postpone my visit until that was over. He seemed so hurt to think that I could prefer any place to him that I did put it off until the next year and made a point of going to the Lithways. I had no forebodings when I got out of Lithway’s car at his gate and faced the second Mrs. Lithway, who had framed her beauty in the clustering wistaria of the porch. I was immensely glad for Lithway that he had a creature like that to companion him. Youth and beauty are wonderful things to keep by one’s fireside. There was more than a touch of vicarious gratitude in my open admiration of Mrs. Lithway. He was a person one couldn’t help wanting good things for; and one felt it a delicate personal attention to oneself when they came to him.