His interest in her led him gradually to other thoughts—­partly disagreeable, partly philosophical.  He had once—­and only once—­found himself involved in a serious love-affair, which, as it had left him a bachelor, had clearly come to no good.  It was with a woman much older than himself—­gifted—­more or less famous—­a kind of modern Corinne whom he had met for a month in Rome in his first youth.  Corinne had laid siege to him, and he had eagerly, whole-heartedly succumbed.  He saw himself, looking back, as the typically befooled and bamboozled mortal; for Corinne, in the end, had thrown him over for a German professor, who admired her books and had a villa on the Janiculum.  During the eighteen years which had elapsed since their adventure, he had quite made it up with her, and had often called at the Janiculan villa, with its antiques, its window to the view, and the great Judas tree between it and Rome.  His sense of escape—­which grew upon him—­was always tempered by a keen respect for the lady’s disinterestedness, and those high ideals which must have led her—­for what else could?—­to prefer the German professor, who had so soon become decrepit, to himself.  But the result of it all had been that the period of highest susceptibility and effervescence had passed by, leaving him still unmarried.  Since then he had had many women-friends, following harmlessly a score of ’chance desires’!  But he had never wanted to marry anybody; and the idea of surrendering the solitude and independence of his pleasant existence had now become distasteful to him.  Renan in some late book speaks of his life as ‘cette charmante promenade a travers la realite.’  Farrell could have adopted much the same words about his own—­until the war.  The war had made him think a good deal, like Sarratt; though the thoughts of a much travelled, epicurean man of the world were naturally very different from those of the young soldier.  At least ’the surge and thunder’ of the struggle had developed in Farrell a new sensitiveness, a new unrest, as though youth had returned upon him.  The easy, drifting days of life before the catastrophe were gone.  The ‘promenade’ was no longer charming.  But the jagged and broken landscape through which it was now taking him, held him often—­like so many others—­breathless with strange awes, strange questionings.  And all the more, because, owing to his physical infirmity, he must be perforce a watcher, a discontented watcher, rather than an actor, in the great scene.

* * * * *

That night Nelly, sitting at her open window, with starlight on the lake, and the cluster rose sending its heavy scent into the room—­wrote to her husband.

’My darling—­it is just a little more than eight hours since I got your telegram.  Sometimes it seems like nothing—­and then like days—­days of happiness.  I was very anxious.  But I know I oughtn’t to write about that.  You say it helps you if I keep cheerful, and always expect the best and not the worst.  Indeed, George, I do keep cheerful.  Ask Miss Martin—­ask Bridget—­’