For holiday they never crossed the sea.  Morton himself had been but once abroad, and that in the year before his father’s death, when he was trying to make up his mind what profession he should take up; he then saw something of France and of Italy.  Talking with travelled friends, he was wont to praise himself in humorous vein for the sober fixity of his life, and to quote, in that mellow tone which gave such charm to his talk, the line from Claudian, ’Erret et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos; for he had several friends to whom a Latin or a Greek quotation was no stumbling-block.  Certain of his college companions, men who had come to hold a place in the world’s eye, were glad to turn aside from beaten tracks and smoke a pipe at Greystone with Basil Morton —­ the quaint fellow who at a casual glance might pass for a Philistine, but was indeed something quite other.  His wife had never left her native island.  ‘I will go abroad,’ she said, ‘when my boys can take me.’  And that might not be long hence; for Harry, who loved no book so much as the atlas, abounded in schemes of travel, and had already mapped the grand tour on which the whole family was to set forth when he stood headboy at the Grammar-School.

In this household Harvey Rolfe knew himself a welcome guest, and never had he been so glad as now to pass from the noisy world into the calm which always fell about him under his friend’s roof.  The miseries through which he had gone were troubling his health, and health disordered naturally reacted upon his mind, so that, owing to a gloomy excitement of the imagination, for several nights he had hardly slept.  No sooner had he lain down in darkness than every form of mortal anguish beset his thoughts, passing before him as though some hand unfolded a pictured scroll of life’s terrors.  He seemed never before to have realised the infinitude of human suffering.  Hour after hour, with brief intervals of semi-oblivion, from which his mind awoke in nameless horror, he travelled from land to land, from age to age; at one moment picturing some dread incident of a thousand years ago; the next, beholding with intolerable vividness some scene of agony reported in the day’s newspaper.  Doubtless it came of his constant brooding on Redgrave’s death and Hugh Carnaby’s punishment.  For the first time, tragedy had been brought near to him, and he marvelled at the indifference with which men habitually live in a world where tragedy is every hour’s occurrence.

He told himself that this was merely a morbid condition of the brain, but could not bring himself to believe it.  On the contrary, what he now saw and felt was the simple truth of things, obscured by everyday conditions of active life.  And that History which he loved to read —­ what was it but the lurid record of woes unutterable?  How could he find pleasure in keeping his eyes fixed on century after century of ever-repeated torment —­ war, pestilence, tyranny; the stake, the dungeon; tortures of infinite device, cruelties inconceivable?  He would close his books, and try to forget all they had taught him.