He stood, looking back upon his life, and quite conscious of some fatal element in the moment which had just gone by.  It struck him as a kind of moral tale.  Some men would say that God had once more, and finally, offered him “a place of repentance”—­through this strange and tardy apparition of his daughter.  A ghostly smile flickered.  The man of the world knew best.  “Let no man break with his own character.”  That was the real text which applied.  And he had followed it.  Circumstance and his own will had determined, twenty years earlier, that he had had enough of women-kind.  His dealings with them had been many and various!  But at a given moment he had put an end to them forever.  And no false sentimentalism should be allowed to tamper with the thing done.

At this point he found himself sinking into his chair; and must needs confess himself somewhat shaken by what had happened.  He was angry with his physical weakness, and haunted in spite of himself by the hue and fragrance of that youth he had just been watching—­there—­at the corner of the table—­beside the Watteau sketch.  He sat staring at the drawing....

Till the threatened vitality within again asserted itself; beat off the besieging thoughts; and clutched fiercely at some new proof of its own strength.  The old man raised himself, and laid his hand on the telephone which connected his room with that of Faversham.

How, in Dixon’s custody, Felicia reached the station, and stumbled into the train, and how, at the other end, she groped her way into the gates of Duddon and began the long woodland ascent to the castle, Felicia never afterward knew.  But when she had gone a few steps along the winding drive Where the intermittent and stormy moonlight was barely enough to guide her, she felt her strength suddenly fail her.  She could never climb the long hill to the house—­she could never fight the wind that was rising in her face.  She must sit down, till some one came—­to help.

She sank down upon a couch of moss, at the foot of a great oak-tree which was still thick with withered leaf.  The mental agitation, and the sheer physical fatigue of her mad attempt had utterly worn out her barely recovered strength.  “I shall faint,” she thought, “and no one will know where I am!” She tried to concentrate her will on the resolution not to faint.  Straightening her back and head against the tree, she clasped her hands rigidly on her knee.  From time to time a wave of passionate recollection would rush through her; and her heart would beat so fast, that again the terror of sinking into some unknown infinite would string up her will to resistance.  In this alternate yielding and recoil, this physical and mental struggle, she passed minutes which seemed to her interminable.  At last resistance was all but overwhelmed.

“Come to me!—­oh, do come to me!”

She seemed to be pouring her very life into the cry.  But, probably, the words were only spoken in the mind.