Page:Friendship, by Ouida.djvu/136

128 pines; together they left the gardens, that grew drear and cold when once the sun had set, and passed across the square in the fleeting twilight.

At her door he bade her adieu, and with a heavy heart and a reluctant step went slowly back to the house which stood to him in the stead of home—a bastard home, warmed with the dull fires of a worn-out passion; he felt a great reluctance to enter, an utter weariness of all he would encounter.

Day after day, night after night, the comedy was always the same. The curt command, the hard contempt, the commercial discussion, the sensual gaze, the trite caress, the hollow ecstasy—he knew them all, one after another, so well—so horribly well. His heart failed him as he mounted the long stone staircase and entered the familiar atmosphere, haunted with stale smoke and stirred by the twang of the mandoline.

He hated the scent; he hated the sounds. They were all fraught to him with the sickliness of an enforced habit, of a perpetual repetition. Shining eyes flashing through tobacco-mist over