then, would just see him in. He rose stiffly and yawned in sheer
exhaustion. Then, hesitating, he turned his head and looked back
towards the hollow. But a vague foreboding held him back. A sour
and vacuous incredulity swept over him. What was the use of all
this struggling and vexation. What gain in living on? Once dead
his sluggish spirit at least would find its rest. Dust to dust it
would indeed be for him. What else, in sober earnest, had he been
all his daily stolid life but half dead, scarce conscious, without
a living thought, or desire, in head or heart?

And while he was still gloomily debating within himself he had
turned towards home, and soon was walking in a kind of reverie,
even his extreme tiredness in part forgotten, and only a far-away
dogged recollection in his mind that in spite of shame, in spite of
all his miserable weakness, the words had been uttered once for all,
and in all sincerity, 'We DID win through.'

Yet a desolate and odd air of strangeness seemed to drape his
unlighted house as he stood looking up in a kind of furtive
communion with its windows. It affected him with that
discomforting air of extreme and meaningless novelty that things
very familiar sometimes take upon themselves. In this leaden
tiredness no impression could be trustworthy. His lids shut of
themselves as he softly mounted the steps. It seemed a needlessly
wide door that soundlessly admitted him. But however hard he
pressed the key his bedroom door remained stubbornly shut until
he found that it was already unlocked and he had only to turn the
handle. A night-light burned in a little basin on the washstand.
The room was hung, as it were, with the stillness of night. And
half lying on the bed in her dressing-gown, her head leaning on