A sight of that extremity fetched prickles to his forehead.

‘You’ve borne your part bravely, my friend.’

‘I!’ Mr. Radnor shrugged at mention of his personal burdens.  ’Praise my Nataly if you like!  Made for one another, if ever two in this world!  You know us both, and do you doubt it?  The sin would have been for us two to meet and—­but enough when I say, that I am she, she me, till death and beyond it:  that’s my firm faith.  Nataly teaches me the religion of life, and you may learn what that is when you fall in love with a woman.  Eighteen-nineteen-twenty years!’

Tears fell from him, two drops.  He blinked, bugled in his throat, eyed his watch, and smiled:  ’The finishing glass!  We should have had to put Colney to bed.  Few men stand their wine.  You and I are not lamed by it; we can drink and do business:  my first experience in the City was, that the power to drink—­keeping a sound head—­conduces to the doing of business.’

‘It’s a pleasant way of instructing men to submit to their conqueror.’

‘If it doubles the energies, mind.’

’Not if it fiddles inside.  I confess to that effect upon me.  I’ve a waltz going on, like the snake with the tail in his mouth, eternal; and it won’t allow of a thought upon Investments.’

‘Consult me to-morrow,’ said Mr. Radnor, somewhat pained for having inconsiderately misled the man he had hitherto helpfully guided.  ’You’ve looked at the warehouse?’

‘That’s performed.’

’Make a practice of getting over as much of your business in the early morning as you well can.’

Mr. Radnor added hints of advice to a frail humanity he was indulgent, the giant spoke in good fellowship.  It would have been to have strained his meaning, for purposes of sarcasm upon him, if one had taken him to boast of a personal exemption from our common weakness.

He stopped, and laughed:  ’Now I ’m pumping my pulpit-eh?  You come with us to Lakelands.  I drive the ladies down to my office, ten A.M.:  if it’s fine; train half-past.  We take a basket.  By the way, I had no letter from Dartrey last mail.’

‘He has buried his wife.  It happens to some men.’

Mr. Radnor stood gazing.  He asked for the name of the place of the burial.  He heard without seizing it.  A simulacrum spectre-spark of hopefulness shot up in his imagination, glowed and quivered, darkening at the utterance of the Dutch syllables, leaving a tinge of witless envy.  Dartrey—­Fenellan had buried the wife whose behaviour vexed and dishonoured him:  and it was in Africa!  One would have to go to Africa to be free of the galling.  But Dartrey had gone, and he was free!—­The strange faint freaks of our sensations when struck to leap and throw off their load after a long affliction, play these disorderly pranks on the brain; and they are faint, but they come in numbers, they are recurring, always in ambush.  We do not speak of them:  we have not words to stamp the indefinite things; generally we should leave them unspoken if we had the words; we know them as out of reason:  they haunt us, pluck at us, fret us, nevertheless.