For in this thankfulness of awakening from the hellish nightmare of the
Terror, Mr. Verity's facile imagination tended to run to another extreme.
With all the seriousness of which he was capable he canvassed the notion
of a definite retirement from the world. Public movements, political and
social experiments ceased to attract him. His appetite for helping to
make the wheels of history go round had been satisfied to the point of
nausea. All he desired was tranquillity and repose. He was free of
domestic obligations and close family ties. He proposed to remain
so--philosophy his mistress, science his hand-maid, literature his
pastime, books (remembering the bitter sorrows of the tumbril and
scaffold in Paris) in future, his closest friends.

But, unfortunately, though the great church in all its calm grave,
beauty still held the heart the fair landscape, the monastery, which
might have sheltered his renunciation, had been put to secular uses or
fallen into ruin long years ago. If he proposed to retire from the
world, he must himself provide suitable environment. Marychurch Abbey,
at the end of the eighteenth century, had very certainly nothing to
offer him under that head.

And then, with a swiftness of conception and decision possible only to
mercurial-minded persons, his thought darted back to Tandy's, that
unkempt, morally malodorous back-of-beyond and No Man's Land. Its vacant
whitewashed countenance and long-eared chimney-stacks had welcomed him,
if roughly and grudgingly, to England and to peace. Was he not in some
sort thereby in debt to Tandy's bound by gratitude to the place? Should
he not buy it--his private fortune being considerable--and there plant
his hermitage? Should he not renovate and transform it, redeeming it from
questionable uses, by transporting thither, not himself only but his fine