As to Quentin Bagott himself, he was little more than a cypher in the business, wanting his nephew to go, and not wanting him; now dwelling on the eternal loneliness to which he was condemned, now implying a sort of furtive glee in the prospect of that loneliness being intensified. He did not know his own mind--as, indeed, how should he, that feeble remnant of the force that once had been, and, such as it had become, devoted to fears and superstitions? No one looking upon him in these days but must have felt the tragedy of that ruined intellect. It mourned from the brilliant eyes, set in the wasted and degraded features, about which the black hair that hung in neglected strands was still without a touch of gray in it; it drooped in the apathetic shoulders, yielded at last, and unresisting, to the burden of fatality; it spoke in the blurred, disjointed voice, which was like that of a sleeper only half awakened. Now and again, in instants of rare provocation, a ray of the old brilliancy would flash out; but for the most part the man’s faculties were hopelessly obscured, and he would sit for long hours together in a blank preoccupation, staring, as it might be, into a baffling fog, where moving shadows that never materialized shrunk, and expanded, and intensified, and again faded into nebulous blots. If during these years, so inoperative, and so barren in their prospect, a thought which seemed to tremble near the verge of treason to himself had come now and again into Brion’s mind, who can wonder at it. It was a thought of a little house in far-away Clapham, and of a figure going always cheerfully and capably about its business there. He had seen Alse once again during his second visit to London, and had pleasantly renewed in her an impression as of something very wholesome and fragrant, like a garden herb, and as such associating itself with perfumed thoughts in homely ways. To uproot so sweet a plant from under that old church wall, and transport it to these unproductive solitudes--what a difference it might make, to him, to all, to the whole atmosphere of the place! It was at least a pleasant fancy to indulge; and could even be supported by some arguments--a little specious. The girl would, he believed, be glad to come. Was he justified, in that case, in sacrificing her happiness to a vain ideal? Again, had he the moral right to waste himself on a profitless abstraction? Every mortal man held his affections in trust for some mortal woman, so that to maintain oneself celibate for a dream’s sake was to rob not one but two natures of their just fulfilment. Supposing he were to decide to be done, for once and for all, with that old dead illusion, and to accept the living gift the gods had offered him? Let him, for amusement’s sake, just consider that possibility. Clerivault, he knew very well, would, for one, be delighted. But then Clerivault knew nothing of the other----