In the shrubberies robins sang, shrilly sweet.  A murmur of waves, breaking at the back of the Bar, hung in the chill, moist, windless air.  Presently a handbarrow rumbled and creaked, as West—­the head gardener, last surviving relic of Thomas Clarkson Verity’s reign—­wheeled it from beneath the ilex trees towards the battery, leaving dark smudgy tracks upon the spangled turf.

Arrived at his objective, the old gardener, with most admired deliberation, loaded down long-handled birch-broom, rake and hoe; and applied himself to mysterious peckings and sweeping of the gravel around the wooden carriages of the little cannon and black pyramid of ball.—­Man, tools, and barrow were outlined against the pensive brightness of autumn sea and autumn sky, which last, to southward, still carried remembrance of sunrise in a broad band of faint yellowish pink, fading upward into misty azure and barred with horizontal pencillings of tarnished silver cloud.

Thus far Charles Verity had watched the progress of the bowed, slow-moving figure musingly.  But now, as the iron of the hoe clinked against the gravel flints, he came back, so to say, to himself and back to the supreme question at issue.  He looked up, his eyes and the soundless ironic laughter resident in them, meeting McCabe’s twinkling, cunning yet faithful and merry little eyes, with a flash.

“The work of the world is not arrested,” he said.  “See, that octogenarian, old West.  He wheeled ill-oiled, squeaking barrows and hacked at the garden paths when I was a Harchester boy.  He wheels the one and hacks at the other even yet—­a fact nicely lowering to one’s private egotism, when you come to consider it.  Why, then, my good friend, perjure yourself or strive to mince matters?  The work of the world will be done whether I’m here to direct the doing of it or not.—­Granted I am tough and in personal knowledge of ill-health a neophyte.  My luck throughout has been almost uncanny.  Neither in soldiering nor in sport, from man or from beast, have I ever suffered so much as a scratch.  I have borne a charmed life—­established a record for invulnerability, which served me well in the East where the gods still walk in the semblance of man and miracle is still persistently prevalent.  Accident has passed me by—­save for being laid up once, nearly thirty years ago, with a broken ankle in the house of some friends at Poonah.”

He ceased speaking, checking, as it seemed, disposition to further disclosure; while the soundless laughter in his eyes found answering expression upon his lips, curving them, to a somewhat bitter smile beneath the flowing moustache.

“In to-day’s enforced idleness how persistently cancelled episodes and emotions rap, ghostly, on the door demanding and gaining entrance!” he presently said.  “Must we take it, Doctor, that oblivion is a fiction, merciful forgetfulness an illusion; and that every action, every desire—­whether fulfilled or not—­is printed indelibly upon one’s memory, merely waiting the hour of weakness and physical defeat to show up?”