In the silence and the lamplight, growing mellower each minute under the green silk shade, he sat confusedly thinking of the past.  And in that dumb reverie, as though of fixed malice, there came to him no memories that were not pleasant, no images that were not fair.  He tried to think of her unkindly, he tried to paint her black; but with the perversity born into the world when he was born, to die when he was dead, she came to him softly, like the ghost of gentleness, to haunt his fancy.  She came to him smelling of sweet scents, with a slight rustling of silk, and the sound of her expectant voice, saying, “Yes, dear?” as though she were not bored.  He remembered when he brought her first to Worsted Skeynes thirty-four years ago, “That timid, and like a rose, but a lady every hinch, the love!” as his old nurse had said.

He remembered her when George was born, like wax for whiteness and transparency, with eyes that were all pupils, and a hovering smile.  So many other times he remembered her throughout those years, but never as a woman faded, old; never as a woman of the past.  Now that he had not got her, for the first time Mr. Pendyce realised that she had not grown old, that she was still to him “timid, and like a rose, but a lady every hinch, the love!” And he could not bear this thought; it made him feel so miserable and lonely in the lamplight, with the grey moths hovering round, and the spaniel John asleep upon his foot.

So, taking his candle, he went up to bed.  The doors that barred away the servants’ wing were closed.  In all that great remaining space of house his was the only candle, the only sounding footstep.  Slowly he mounted as he had mounted many thousand times, but never once like this, and behind him, like a shadow, mounted the spaniel John.

And She that knows the hearts of men and dogs, the Mother from whom all things come, to whom they all go home, was watching, and presently, when they were laid, the one in his deserted bed, the other on blue linen, propped against the door, She gathered them to sleep.

But Wednesday came, and with it Wednesday duties.  They who have passed the windows of the Stoics’ Club and seen the Stoics sitting there have haunting visions of the idle landed classes.  These visions will not let them sleep, will not let their tongues to cease from bitterness, for they so long to lead that “idle” life themselves.  But though in a misty land illusions be our cherished lot, that we may all think falsely of our neighbours and enjoy ourselves, the word “idle” is not at all the word.

Many and heavy tasks weighed on the Squire at Worsted Skeynes.  There was the visit to the stables to decide as to firing Beldame’s hock, or selling the new bay horse because he did not draw men fast enough, and the vexed question of Bruggan’s oats or Beal’s, talked out with Benson, in a leather belt and flannel shirt-sleeves, like a corpulent, white-whiskered boy.  Then the long sitting in