“Do. I will wait for you here.” Then he leant against the parapet and prayed passionately, for he knew that the conventions would claim him soon. God was beyond them, but ah, how far beyond, and to be reached after what degradation! At the end of this childish detour his wife awaited him, not less surely because she was only his wife in name. He was too weak. Books and friends were not enough. Little by little she would claim him and corrupt him and make him what he had been; and the woman he loved would die out, in drunkenness, in debauchery, and her strength would be dissipated by a man, her beauty defiled in a man. She would not continue. That mystic rose and the face it illumined meant nothing. The stream—he was above it now—meant nothing, though it burst from the pure turf and ran for ever to the sea. The bather, the shoulders of Orion-they all meant nothing, and were going nowhere. The whole affair was a ridiculous dream.

Leighton returned, saying, “Haven’t you seen Stephen? They say he followed us: he can still walk: I told you he wasn’t so bad.”

“I don’t think he passed me. Ought one to look?” He wandered a little along the Roman road. Again nothing mattered. At the level-crossing he leant on the gate to watch a slow goods train pass. In the glare of the engine he saw that his brother had come this way, perhaps through some sodden memory of the Rings, and now lay drunk over the rails. Wearily he did a man’s duty. There was time to raise him up and push him into safety. It is also a man’s duty to save his own life, and therefore he tried. The train went over his knees. He died up in Cadover, whispering, “You have been right,” to Mrs. Failing.

She wrote of him to Mrs. Lewin afterwards as “one who has failed in all he undertook; one of the thousands whose dust returns to the dust, accomplishing nothing in the interval. Agnes and I buried him to the sound of our cracked bell, and pretended that he had once been alive. The other, who was always honest, kept away.”

XXXV

From the window they looked over a sober valley, whose sides were not too sloping to be ploughed, and whose trend was followed by a grass-grown track. It was late on Sunday afternoon, and the valley was deserted except for one labourer, who was coasting slowly downward on a rosy bicycle. The air was very quiet. A jay screamed up in the woods behind, but the ring-doves, who roost early, were already silent. Since the window opened westward, the room was flooded with light, and Stephen, finding it hot, was working in his shirtsleeves.

“You guarantee they’ll sell?” he asked, with a pen between his teeth. He was tidying up a pile of manuscripts.

“I guarantee that the world will be the gainer,” said Mr. Pembroke, now a clergyman, who sat beside him at the table with an expression of refined disapproval on his face.

“I’d got the idea that the long story had its points, but that these shorter things didn’t—what’s the word?”

“‘Convince’ is probably the word you want. But that type of criticism is quite a thing of the past. Have you seen the illustrated American edition?”