A happier lot was in store for him.  At the age of fifty, just when his health had begun to fail and his energies to show abatement, Ryecroft had the rare good fortune to find himself suddenly released from toil, and to enter upon a period of such tranquillity of mind and condition as he had never dared to hope.  On the death of an acquaintance, more his friend than he imagined, the wayworn man of letters learnt with astonishment that there was bequeathed to him a life annuity of three hundred pounds.  Having only himself to support (he had been a widower for several years, and his daughter, an only child, was married), Ryecroft saw in this income something more than a competency.  In a few weeks he quitted the London suburb where of late he had been living, and, turning to the part of England which he loved best, he presently established himself in a cottage near Exeter, where, with a rustic housekeeper to look after him, he was soon thoroughly at home.  Now and then some friend went down into Devon to see him; those who had that pleasure will not forget the plain little house amid its half-wild garden, the cosy book-room with its fine view across the valley of the Exe to Haldon, the host’s cordial, gleeful hospitality, rambles with him in lanes and meadows, long talks amid the stillness of the rural night.  We hoped it would all last for many a year; it seemed, indeed, as though Ryecroft had only need of rest and calm to become a hale man.  But already, though he did not know it, he was suffering from a disease of the heart, which cut short his life after little more than a lustrum of quiet contentment.  It had always been his wish to die suddenly; he dreaded the thought of illness, chiefly because of the trouble it gave to others.  On a summer evening, after a long walk in very hot weather, he lay down upon the sofa in his study, and there—­as his calm face declared—­passed from slumber into the great silence.

When he left London, Ryecroft bade farewell to authorship.  He told me that he hoped never to write another line for publication.  But, among the papers which I looked through after his death, I came upon three manuscript books which at first glance seemed to be a diary; a date on the opening page of one of them showed that it had been begun not very long after the writer’s settling in Devon.  When I had read a little in these pages, I saw that they were no mere record of day-to-day life; evidently finding himself unable to forego altogether the use of the pen, the veteran had set down, as humour bade him, a thought, a reminiscence, a bit of reverie, a description of his state of mind, and so on, dating such passage merely with the month in which it was written.  Sitting in the room where I had often been his companion, I turned page after page, and at moments it was as though my friend’s voice sounded to me once more.  I saw his worn visage, grave or smiling; recalled his familiar pose or gesture.  But in this written gossip he revealed himself more intimately than in our conversation of the days gone by.  Ryecroft had never erred by lack of reticence; as was natural in a sensitive man who had suffered much, he inclined to gentle acquiescence, shrank from argument, from self-assertion.  Here he spoke to me without restraint, and, when I had read it all through, I knew the man better than before.