The room was intolerable to him, he stifled and struggled in its air of bitter longings. His dreams had built a pavilion in his garden, and hung it with tapestries, and fate, terrible as an army with banners, had torn them down and trampled upon them in its relentless march. He could at least refuse to look on the ruins any more.
He turned to leave the room, looking round it once more, even as last Friday Norah had looked round his office, knowing that she would not see it again. There was nothing here that belonged to the life that stretched in front of him: all was part of the past. The most he could do was to exercise the fortitude he had enjoined on Alice, and banish from sight the material things round which, close as the tendrils of ivy, were twined the associations of what he had missed. All that his books had to say to him was pitched in the tones of the voice that he must remember as little as possible, for now if he opened one and read, it was Norah whom he heard reading. She filled the room....
It was late: a long day’s work was behind him, another lay in front of him, and he went out turning the key in the lock. He hung it on one of the chamois-horns tipped with brass, that formed the hat-rack.
GLASGOW: W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.