Page:The Yellow Book - 03.djvu/212

 striving to frame them, there came a great crash. A bough clattered down on the tombstones; and with a start he awoke.

A half-burned coal was smoking in the fender. He felt as if he had been sleeping for many hours.

He fell to stupidly watching the red-heat, as it pulsed through the caves of coal, to imagining himself climbing their ashen mountain-ridges, across dark defiles, up the face of treacherous precipices

Hundreds of times, here, in this room, in this chair, before this fire, he had sat smoking, picturing the old scenes to himself, musing of Ethel Fulton (Ethel Winn she had been then; but, after her marriage, he had forced himself to think of her as bearing her husband's name—that was a mortification from which he had derived a sort of bitter satisfaction). But now, with the long accumulation of his solitude—five years he had been vicar of Scarsdale—he had grown so unconscious of self, so indifferent to the course of his own existence, that every process of his mind had, from sheer lack of external stimulation, stagnated, till, little by little, the growth of mechanical habit had come to mould its shape and determine its limitations. And hence, not for a moment had he ever realised the grip that this habit of sentimental reminiscence had taken on him, nor the grotesque extent of its futile repetition. Such was the fervour of his attitude towards his single chapter of romance.

Five years ago, she and he had promised their lives to one another. And the future had beckoned them onward, gaily, belittling every obstacle in its suffusion of glad, alluring colour. He was poor: he had but his curate's stipend, and she was used to a regular routine of ease. But he would have tended her wants, waiting on her, watching over her, indefatigably; chastening all the best that was in him, that he might lay it at her feet. And