“It is a horror,” he remarked, “that we generally find in the very old, and seldom in the young.”  They both expressed their interest in what he told them; it seemed to them very strange.  Another strange thing about the day was that the luncheon was forgotten by all of them until it was late in the afternoon, and then Mrs. Chailey waited on them, and looked strange too, because she wore a stiff print dress, and her sleeves were rolled up above her elbows.  She seemed as oblivious of her appearance, however, as if she had been called out of her bed by a midnight alarm of fire, and she had forgotten, too, her reserve and her composure; she talked to them quite familiarly as if she had nursed them and held them naked on her knee.  She assured them over and over again that it was their duty to eat.

The afternoon, being thus shortened, passed more quickly than they expected.  Once Mrs. Flushing opened the door, but on seeing them shut it again quickly; once Helen came down to fetch something, but she stopped as she left the room to look at a letter addressed to her.  She stood for a moment turning it over, and the extraordinary and mournful beauty of her attitude struck Terence in the way things struck him now—­as something to be put away in his mind and to be thought about afterwards.  They scarcely spoke, the argument between them seeming to be suspended or forgotten.

Now that the afternoon sun had left the front of the house, Ridley paced up and down the terrace repeating stanzas of a long poem, in a subdued but suddenly sonorous voice.  Fragments of the poem were wafted in at the open window as he passed and repassed.

     Peor and Baalim
       Forsake their Temples dim,
     With that twice batter’d God of Palestine
       And mooned Astaroth—­

The sound of these words were strangely discomforting to both the young men, but they had to be borne.  As the evening drew on and the red light of the sunset glittered far away on the sea, the same sense of desperation attacked both Terence and St. John at the thought that the day was nearly over, and that another night was at hand.  The appearance of one light after another in the town beneath them produced in Hirst a repetition of his terrible and disgusting desire to break down and sob.  Then the lamps were brought in by Chailey.  She explained that Maria, in opening a bottle, had been so foolish as to cut her arm badly, but she had bound it up; it was unfortunate when there was so much work to be done.  Chailey herself limped because of the rheumatism in her feet, but it appeared to her mere waste of time to take any notice of the unruly flesh of servants.  The evening went on.  Dr. Lesage arrived unexpectedly, and stayed upstairs a very long time.  He came down once and drank a cup of coffee.