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CHAPTER XIII.

6 ONE MINDED LIKE THE WEATHER, MOST UNQUIETLY.'

EVENING was setting in as Robert Charlton returned to Bolingbroke Place. A change had come over the day; there was something strange and ominous in the atmosphere and in the sky. Heavy yellow clouds showing as if charged with thunder were coming together slowly and settling along the horizon. An uncanny light

gleamed from beneath their edges.

there seemed a kind of yellow fog

The air was thick; abroad; only it was

not like the familiar visitation of our November days, any more than it resembled the golden haze of the Campagna or Thrasymene. A storm of some sort appeared about to burst in thunder and rain, and yet it did not come. It exhaled, one might have thought, in the curious yellow haze, and was dissipated unwholesomely abroad. People passing along the streets sometimes stopped and looked

up amazed at the unusual appearance of the sky and the clouds. It must be something very unusual that can attract the ordinary Londoner to look up at the sky. A cab-horse down, or a man having his boots blacked, or a woman raising a window, will attract him fast enough, and indeed will hold him from the pursuit of his journey as Punch and Judy hold an errand-boy. But there must be something wonderful going on in the sky before it will strike him as calling for observation. This evening, people did stop to look up at the sky, and they then usually looked down hastily at the pavement, expecting to see it flecked with great raindrops; and forthwith glanced up at the sky again as if seeking there for explanation of something that puzzled them. Some hurried on as if to escape from the expected downpour and then after a moment or two, seeing that no downpour appeared to be coming, they slackened their pace and looked as if they had not expected anything in particular. As Robert Charlton turned down. Bolingbroke Place its aspect was very peculiar, for its narrowness allowed it to be completely canopied by one of the thick yellow clouds. Charlton walked up to the door under this strange unwholesome ill-omened roof of

cloud. He looked up once or twice, and hastily looked down again as if he did not like the sight.

He opened the door with his latch-key and went in. Before the door of what were Fielding's rooms he stopped for a moment and listened. All was silence. He tried the door. It was unlocked as usual. He opened it and looked in. The rooms were evidently unoccupied still. If Lefussis meant to have them, he had not made any way in their occupation yet. All the things that Fielding owned were gone, and the rooms were reduced to their ordinary London-lodging condition. Charlton stood for a moment thinking how badly things had gone with him since first he used to enter those rooms; how happily all had turned out for Fielding, and how miserably for him. He saw everything now in cold clear light; he had no more illusions about himself or anyone else. He now saw Fielding only as kind, generous, and manly; his own ignoble jealousies about Janet appeared to him exactly what they might have appeared to any impartial observer. He saw that every evil that had come on him had come by his own fault, by his own direct action and invocation. He had persistently turned kindness into unkindness and in

terpreted good as evil. He had allowed himself to be possessed of devils. He had invited them, and they came at last. Yet he did not feel exactly repentant. He had only a dull pervading sensation that everything had gone wrong, and that he was the cause of it all; that he had himself to blame. But he had not the moral energy to blame himself in the healthy way of one who is resolved that if he has done harm he will try to atone for it, and that if he has fallen he will try to get up again. He had, indeed, a vague sense of satisfaction in having completely thwarted Paulina, and thus done some service, however small, to Gabrielle; and there was just enough of a better soul left in him to make him feel a certain satisfaction in the thought that Gabrielle would never know it was he who had done this much good. He was proud, that is to say, that his attempt to do her a service was wholly unrecognised and unrewarded. But he had no true repentant

But he had no

purpose. He had no thought of the one only way by which he could have made his repentance of some account to others—of trying to redeem his life and retrieve himself, and win back the affection and confidence of his wife and make her happy. His nature had not the

moral fibre for this. It was too limp and nerveless. All he felt was that he was good for nothing any more.

So he closed the door of the room again, and he dragged heavily up the stairs. Through each window, as he mounted, the yellow atmosphere showed itself with what seemed to him a baleful glare. As he rose somewhat high he came to a landing with a window from which he could just see the tops of two trees far away somewhere; he could see them against the sky, and nothing else. His mind went back to a time when he lived with his father and mother in a small London room, very high up, from the window of which he could just see the tips of two trees that seemed to him then to be growing in the land of romance and of youth, and of the strange sweet adventures which fanciful boyhood expects vaguely for coming manhood's days. He used to think wonderingly of what was on the other side of those trees, and how they could be reached, and whether he should reach them, and what exquisite experiences of love and struggle and strictly romantic heroic suffering and final success he should have when he got there. The odd idea struck him that perhaps these were the same two trees now seen from