It was no mere failing of purpose.  He prepared his lectures as thoroughly as ever, and delivered them with no less zeal than in the first weeks; indeed, if anything, his energy grew, for, since his nearer acquaintance with Gilbert Grail, the latter’s face before him was always an incentive.  There was much to discourage him.  More than half his class fell from lukewarmness to patent indifference; they would probably present themselves until the end of the course, but it was little likely that they would recommence with him after Christmas.  He was obliged to recognise the utter absence of idealism from all save Grail—­unless Bunce might be credited with glimmerings of the true light.  Yet intellectually he held himself on firm ground.  To have discovered one man such as Grail was compensation for failure with many others, and the project of the library was at all times a vista of hope.  But Egremont was not of those who can live on altruism.  His life of loneliness irked him, irked him as never yet.  The dawn was a recurrence of weariness; the long nights were cold and blank.

The old unrest, which he had believed at an end when once ’the task of his life’ was discovered, troubled him through many a cloud-enveloped day.  Had he been free, it would have driven him on new travels.  Yet that was no longer a real resource.  He did not desire to see other lands, but to make a home in his own.  And no home was promised him.  The longer he kept apart from Annabel, the dimmer did the vision of her become; he held it a sign that he himself was seldom if ever in her mind.  Did he still love her?  Rather he would have said that there lay in him great faculty of love, which Annabel, if she willed it, could at a moment bring into life; she, he believed, in preference to any woman he had known.  It was not passion, and the consciousness that it was not, often depressed him.  One of his ideals was that of a passion nurtured to be the crowning glory of life.  He did not love Annabel in that way; would that he could have done!

This purely personal distress could not but affect his work.  A month before the end of the year he came to the resolve to choose a new subject for the succeeding course of lectures.  Forgetting all the sound arguments by which he had been led to prefer the simple teaching of a straightforward subject to any more ambitious prophecy, he was now impelled to think out a series of discourses on —­well, on things in general.  He got hold of the title, ’Thoughts for the Present,’ and the temptation to make use of it proved too great.  English literature did not hold the average proletarian mind.  It had served him to make an acquaintance with a little group of men; now he must address them in a bolder way, reveal to them his personality.  Had he not always contemplated such revelation in the end?  Yes, when he found his class fit for it.  But he was growing impatient with this slow progress—­if indeed it could be called progress at all.  He would strike a more significant note.