He found little leisure for amusement, even had he been inclined that way.  Night found him very tired; morning brought a hundred self-imposed and complicated tasks to be accomplished before the advent of another night.

He lived at his club and wrote to his aunt from there.  Sundays were more difficult to negotiate; he went to St. George’s in the morning, read in the club library until afternoon permitted him to maintain some semblance of those social duties which no man has a right to entirely neglect.

Now and then he dined out; once he went to the opera with the O’Haras; but it nearly did for him, for they sang “Madame Butterfly,” and Farrar’s matchless voice and acting tore him to shreds.  Only the happy can endure such tragedy.

And one Sunday, having pondered long that afternoon over the last letter Malcourt had ever written him, he put on hat and overcoat and went to Greenlawn Cemetery—­a tedious journey through strange avenues and unknown suburbs, under a wet sky from which occasionally a flake or two of snow fell through the fine-spun drizzle.

In the cemetery the oaks still bore leaves which were growing while Malcourt was alive; here and there a beech-tree remained in full autumn foliage and the grass on the graves was intensely green; but the few flowers that lifted their stalks were discoloured and shabby; bare branches interlaced overhead; dead leaves, wet and flattened, stuck to slab and headstone or left their stained imprints on the tarnished marble.

He had bought some flowers—­violets and lilies—­at a florist’s near the cemetery gates.  These he laid, awkwardly, at the base of the white slab from which Malcourt’s newly cut name stared at him.

Louis Malcourt lay, as he had wished, next to his father.  Also, as he had desired, a freshly planted tree, bereft now of foliage, rose, spindling, to balance an older one on the other corner of the plot.  His sister’s recently shaped grave lay just beyond.  As yet, Bertie had provided no headstone for the late Lady Tressilvain.

Hamil stood inspecting Malcourt’s name, finding it impossible to realise that he was dead—­or for that matter, unable to comprehend death at all.  The newly chiselled letters seemed vaguely instinct with something of Malcourt’s own clean-cut irony; they appeared to challenge him with their mocking legend of death, daring him, with sly malice, to credit the inscription.

To look at them became almost an effort, so white and clear they stared back at him—­as though the pallid face of the dead himself, set for ever in raillery, was on the watch to detect false sentiment and delight in it.  And Hamil’s eyes fell uneasily upon the flowers, then lifted.  And he said aloud, unconsciously: 

“You are right; it’s too late, Malcourt.”

There was a shabby, neglected grave in the adjoining plot; he bent over, gathered up his flowers, and laid them on the slab of somebody aged ninety-three whose name was blotted out by wet dead leaves.  Then he slowly returned to face Malcourt, and stood musing, gloved hands deep in his overcoat pockets.