At the moment, evidences of Blake’s unusually long occupancy broke this stiffness in many directions; intimate trifles that speak a man’s presence were strewn here and there—­objects of utility, objects of value and interest gathered upon his last long journey.  Eminently pleasant the salon appeared in the sunshine of the May morning—­full of air and light, its gray carpet and gray-panelled walls making an agreeably neutral setting to the household gods of a gentleman of leisure.  But the gentleman in question, so agreeably situated, seemed to find his state less gratifying than it might appear; a sense of dissatisfaction possessed him, as he sat at his solitary meal, a sense of dulness and loss most tenacious of hold.

More than once he roundly called himself a fool; more than once he shook out the thin sheets of his morning paper and buried himself in their contents, but unavailingly.  The feeling of flatness, the sense of dissatisfaction with the world as it stood, grew instead of diminishing.  At last, throwing down the paper, he gave up the unequal struggle and yielded to the pessimistic pleasure of self-analysis.  He recalled last night and its vexatious trend of events, and with something akin to shame, he remembered his anger against Max; but although he admitted its possible exaggeration, the admission brought no palliation of Max’s offence.  He, possibly, had behaved like a brute; but Max had behaved like an imbecile!

At this point, he fell to staring fixedly in front of him, and through the meshes of his day-dream floated a face—­not the face of the boy he was condemning, but that of the mysterious cause of last night’s calamity.

He conjured it with quite astonishing vividness—­the face of the portrait—­the face so like, so unlike, the boy’s.  Every detail of the picture assailed him; the subtle illusion of the mirror—­the strange, reflected eyes propounding their riddle.

Looking in imagination into those eyes, he lost himself delightfully.  Sensations, periods of time passed and repassed in his brain—­speculation, desire, and memory danced an enchanting, tangled measure.

He recalled the hundred fancies that had held, or failed to hold him in his thirty-eight years; he recalled the women who had loved too little, the women who had loved too much; and, quick upon the recollection, came the consciousness of the disillusion that had inevitably followed upon adventure.

He did not ask himself why these dreams should stir, why these ghosts should materialize and kiss light hands to him in the blue brilliance of this May morning; he realized nothing but that behind them all—­a reality in a world of shadows—­he saw the eyes of the picture insistently propounding their riddle—­the riddle, the question that from youth upward had rankled, inarticulate, in his own soul.

It arose now, renewed, with his acknowledgment of it—­the troubling, insistent question that cries in every human brain, sometimes softly, like a child sobbing outside a closed door, sometimes loudly and terribly, like a man in agony.  The eternal question ringing through the ages.