She flashed a queer, scared look at me, then at the fire, then at me again and then burst out crying, her head and arms on her knees.

I muttered a man’s words of awkward comfort, saying something about the baby.

“It isn’t baby I’m crying about,” sobbed Carlotta.  “It’s me!  And it’s you!  And it’s all the things I’m beginning to understand.”

I patted her head and lit a cigarette and wandered about the room, rather puzzled by Carlotta’s psychological development, and yet stirred by a faint thrill at her recognition of my affection.  At the same time the sad “too late, too late,” was knelled in my ears, and I thought of the might-have-been, and rode the merry-go-round of regret’s banalities.  I had grown old.  Passion had died.  Hope—­the hope of hearing the patter of a child’s feet about my house, the hope of pride in a quasi-paternity, of handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of life—­hope was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin.  Only a great, quiet love remained.  I was a tired old man, and Carlotta was to me an infinitely loved sister—­or daughter—­or granddaughter even—­so old did I feel.  And when I raised her from the fender-stool, and kissed the tears from her eyes, it was as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been given in this world.

The same old problem again.  What the deuce to do with Carlotta?  Yet not quite the same:  rather, what the deuce to do with Carlotta and myself?  In our strange relationship we were inextricably bound together.

First, she needed sunshine—­instead of the forlorn bleakness of an English spring—­and a change from this house of pain and death.  And then I, too, felt the need of wider horizons.  London had grown to be a nightmare city which I never entered.  Its restless ambitions were not mine.  Its pleasures pleased me not.  With not five of its five million inhabitants dared I speak heart to heart.  Judith had gone out of my life.  My aunts and cousins regarded me as beyond the moral pale.  Mrs. McMurray was still unaware of my return to England.  I confess to shabby treatment of my kind friend.  I know she would have flown to aid Carlotta in her troubles; but would she have understood Carlotta?  Reasoning now I am convinced that she would:  in those days I did not reason.  I shrank like a snail into its shell.  The simile is commonplace; but so was I—­the most commonplace human snail that ever occupied a commonplace ten-roomed shell.  And now the house and its useless books and its million-fold more useless manuscript “History of Renaissance Morals,” all its sombre memories and its haunting ghosts of ineffectualities, became an unwholesome prison in which I was wasting away a feeble existence.  I resolved to quit it, to leave my books, to abjure Renaissance morals, and to go forth with Carlotta into the wilderness and the sunshine, there to fulfil whatever destiny the high gods should decree.

CHAPTER XXV