“Really, Mariana,” he protested, “at times you are a little rough.  She is a very fine girl; in fact, reminds me of Scalchi.  Old Byron, though, what—­a regular catafalque!” A blundering step mounted to the stair; Kingsfrere entered and stood wavering and concerned, the collar wilted and a gaiter missing.  “Ought to do something about the front door,” he asserted; “frightful condition, no paint; and full of splinters.  Very plump splinters,” he specified, examining a hand.  Mariana surveyed him coolly, thoroughly.  “Sweet, isn’t he?” she remarked.  “Kingsfrere Gilbert Todd Jannan.”

“That’s absolutely all,” that individual assured her.  “Except if you want to add Sturgeon; some do.  Hullow, Howat!  Grand old boy, Howat,” he told her.  “But if he says I’m drunk, I will tell you one of Bundy’s stories about him.  This—­this elegant deception tremendous noise with the song birds.”  He sat abruptly on a providentially convenient chair.  There, limply, he hiccoughed.  “Sweet,” Mariana repeated.  Kingsfrere finally rose, and, with a friendly wave, wandered from the room.

“It was good of you to take me, Howat,” she told him wearily.  “Although, now, I can see that you went willingly enough.  You thought it would cure me.  But of what, Howat—­of love?  Of a feeling that, perhaps, I’d found a reason for living?”

A decidedly uncomfortable feeling, doubt, invaded him.  He had an unjustified sense of meddling, of blundering into a paramount situation to which he lacked the key.  He had done nothing debatable, he assured himself; Mariana’s inherent, well—­prejudices, couldn’t be charged to him.  In the room where he was to sleep the uneasiness followed him.  She was his greatest, his only concern.  Howat Penny reviewed his desire for her, his preference for a Mariana untouched by the common surge of living.  He recalled the discontent, the feeling of sterility, that had lately possessed him; the suspicion that his life had been in vain.  All his philosophy, his accumulated convictions, were involved; and, tie in hand, he sat endeavouring to pierce the confusion of his ideas.

He was conscious of a slow change gathering within him; and, in itself, that consciousness was disturbing.  It had a vaguely dark, chill aspect.  He shivered, in the room super-heated by summer; his blood ran thinner and cold.  Howat Penny had a sudden, startling sense of his utter loneliness; there was absolutely no one, now, to whom he could turn for the understanding born of long and intimately affectionate association.  Mariana was lost to him in her own poignant affair ...  No children.  So many, so much, dead.  His countenance, however, grew firm with the determination that age should not find him a coward.  He had always been bitterly contemptuous of the men that, surfeiting their appetites, showed at the impotent last a cheap repentance.  But he had done nothing pointedly wrong; he had—­the inversion repeated itself—­done nothing.