his unwillingness to accept hospitality from the tradesmen of Grasmere and Ambleside, he maintained his dignity and exaggerated his importance.  He had his books and his newspapers, his evening leisure, which no one ever dared to disturb.  He had the old wing of the house for his exclusive occupation; and no one ventured to intrude upon him in his privacy.  There was a bell in the corridor which communicated with his rooms, and by this bell he was always summoned.  There were servants who had been ten years at Fellside, and who had never crossed the threshold of the red cloth door which was the only communication between the new house and the old one.  Steadman’s wife performed all household duties of cooking and cleaning in the south wing, where she and her husband took all their meals, and lived entirely apart from the other servants, an exclusiveness which was secretly resented by the establishment.

‘Mr. Steadman may be a very superior man,’ said the butler ’and I know that in his own estimation the Premier isn’t in it compared with him; but I never was fond of people who set themselves upon pinnacles, and I’m not fond of the Steadmans.’

‘Mrs. Steadman’s plain and homely enough,’ replied the housekeeper, ’and I know she’d like to be more sociable, and drop into my room for a cup of tea now and then; but Steadman do so keep her under his thumb:  and because he’s a misanthrope she’s obliged to sit and mope alone.’

If Steadman wanted to drive, there was a dogcart and horse at his disposal; but he did not often leave Fellside.  He seemed in his humble way to model his life upon Lady Maulevrier’s secluded habits.  It was growing dusk when Steadman left his mistress, and she lay for some time looking at the landscape over which twilight shadows were stealing, and thinking of her own life.  Over that life, too, the shadows of evening were creeping.  She had began to realise the fact that she was an old woman; that for her all personal interest in life was nearly over.  She had never felt her age while her activity was unimpaired.  She had been obliged to remind herself very often that the afternoon and evening of life had slipped away unawares in that tranquil retirement, and that the night was at hand.

For her the close of earthly life meant actual night.  No new dawn, no mysterious after-life shone upon her with magical gleams of an unknown light upon the other side of the dark river.  She had accepted the Materialist’s bitter and barren creed, and had taught herself that this little life was all.  She had learned to scorn the idea of a great Artificer outside the universe, a mighty spirit riding amidst the clouds, and ruling the course of nature and the fate of man.  She had schooled herself to think that the idea of a blind, unconscious Nature, working automatically through infinite time and space, was ever so much grander than the old-world notion of a personal God, a Being of infinite power and inexhaustible