A low fire was burning—­one of those fires that throw faint shadows everywhere, and once and again glow so that some object shines for a moment, some shape is clearly seen.  The curtains were not quite drawn, and a plane-tree branch with leaves still hanging, which had kept them company all the fifteen years they had lived there, was moving darkly in the wind, now touching the glass with a frail tap, as though asking of him, who had been roaming in that wind so many hours, to let it in.  Unfailing comrades—­London plane-trees!

He had not dared hope that Sylvia would be asleep.  It was merciful that she was, whichever way the issue went—­that issue so cruel.  Her face was turned towards the fire, and one hand rested beneath her cheek.  So she often slept.  Even when life seemed all at sea, its landmarks lost, one still did what was customary.  Poor tender-hearted thing—­she had not slept since he told her, forty-eight hours, that seemed such years, ago!  With her flaxen hair, and her touching candour, even in sleep, she looked like a girl lying there, not so greatly changed from what she had been that summer of Cicely’s marriage down at Hayle.  Her face had not grown old in all those twenty-eight years.  There had been till now no special reason why it should.  Thought, strong feeling, suffering, those were what changed faces; Sylvia had never thought very deeply, never suffered much, till now.  And was it for him, who had been careful of her—­very careful on the whole, despite man’s selfishness, despite her never having understood the depths of him—­ was it for him of all people to hurt her so, to stamp her face with sorrow, perhaps destroy her utterly?

He crept a little farther in and sat down in the arm-chair beyond the fire.  What memories a fire gathered into it, with its flaky ashes, its little leaf-like flames, and that quiet glow and flicker!  What tale of passions!  How like to a fire was a man’s heart!  The first young fitful leapings, the sudden, fierce, mastering heat, the long, steady sober burning, and then—­that last flaming-up, that clutch back at its own vanished youth, the final eager flight of flame, before the ashes wintered it to nothing!  Visions and memories he saw down in the fire, as only can be seen when a man’s heart, by the agony of long struggle, has been stripped of skin, and quivers at every touch.  Love!  A strange haphazard thing was love—­so spun between ecstacy and torture!  A thing insidious, irresponsible, desperate.  A flying sweetness, more poignant than anything on earth, more dark in origin and destiny.  A thing without reason or coherence.  A man’s love-life—­ what say had he in the ebb and flow of it?  No more than in the flights of autumn birds, swooping down, alighting here and there, passing on.  The loves one left behind—­even in a life by no means vagabond in love, as men’s lives went!  The love that thought the Tyrol skies would fall if he were not first with a certain lady.