"Voices of the dead!" he murmured half aloud. "I should have learned wisdom from you all long ago! What have the great geniuses of the world lived for? For what purpose did they use their brains and pens? Simply to teach mankind the folly of too much faith! Yet we continue to delude ourselves—and the worst of it is that we do it wilfully and knowingly. We are perfectly aware that when we trust, we shall be deceived—yet we trust on! Even I—old and frail and about to die—cannot rid myself of a belief in God, and in the ultimate happiness of each man's destiny. And yet, so far as my own experience serves me, I have nothing to go upon—absolutely nothing!"
He gave an unconscious gesture—half of scorn, half of despair—and paced the room slowly up and down. A life of toil—a life rounding into worldly success, but blank of all love and heart's comfort—was this to be the only conclusion to his career? Of what use, then, was it to have lived at all?
"People talk foolishly of a 'declining birth-rate,'" he went on; "yet if, according to the modern scientist, all civilisations are only so much output of wasted human energy, doomed to pass into utter oblivion, and human beings only live but to die and there an end, of what avail is it to be born at all? Surely it is but wanton cruelty to take upon ourselves the responsibility of continuing a race whose only consummation is rottenness in unremembered graves!"
At that moment the door opened and Lucy Sorrel entered softly, with a pretty air of hesitating timidity which became her style of beauty excellently well. As he looked up and saw her standing half shyly on the threshold, a white, light, radiant figure expressing exquisitely fresh youth, grace and—innocence?—yes! surely that wondrous charm which hung about her like a delicate atmosphere redolent with the perfume of spring, could only be the mystic exhalation of a pure mind adding spiritual lustre to the material attraction of a perfect body,—his heart misgave him. Already he was full of remorse lest so much as a passing thought in his brain might have done her unmerited wrong. He advanced to meet her, and his voice was full of kindness as he said:—
"Is your dance quite over, Lucy? Are you sure I am not selfishly depriving you of pleasure by asking you to come away from all your young friends just to talk to me for a few minutes in this dull room?"
She raised her beautiful eyes confidingly.
"Dear Mr. Helmsley, there can be no greater pleasure for me than to talk to you!" she answered sweetly.
His expression changed and hardened. "That's not true," he thought; "and she knows it, and I know it." Aloud he said: "Very prettily spoken, Lucy! But I am aware of my own tediousness and I won't detain you long. Will you sit down?" and he offered her an easy-chair, into which she sank with the soft slow grace of a nestling bird. "I only want to say just a few words,—such as your father might say to you if he were so inclined—about your future."
She gave him a swift glance of keen inquiry.