natural thing to do. But still he had not been left alone--entirely
alone--for three years or more.

The days and weeks went on. If Richard had been accounted eccentric
before, there was far greater cause for the term now. Life dragged. Too
much had been taken out of his life all at once; for, in the first place,
the family had been drawn together more during the trouble which Lali's
advent had brought; then the child and its mother, his pupil, were gone
also. He wandered about in a kind of vague unrest. The hardest thing in
this world to get used to is the absence of a familiar footstep and the
cheerful greeting of a familiar eye. And the man with no chick or child
feels even the absence of his dog from the hearth-rug when he returns
from a journey or his day's work. It gives him a sense of strangeness
and loss. But when it is the voice of a woman and the hand of a child
that is missed, you can back no speculation upon that man's mood or mind
or conduct. There is no influence like the influence of habit, and that
is how, when the minds of people are at one, physical distances and
differences, no matter how great, are invisible, or at least not obvious.

Richard Armour was a sensible man; but when one morning he suddenly
packed a portmanteau and went up to town to Cavendish Square, the act
might be considered from two sides of the equation. If he came back to
enter again into the social life which, for so many years, he had
abjured, it was not very sensible, because the world never welcomes its
deserters; it might, if men and women grew younger instead of older. If
he came to see his family, or because he hungered for his godchild, or
because--but we are hurrying the situation. It were wiser not to state
the problem yet. The afternoon that he arrived at Cavendish Square all
his family were out except his brother's wife. Lali was in the drawing-
room, receiving a visitor who had asked for Mrs. Armour and Mrs. Francis