For appreciations of this kind, he had, nowadays, ample leisure; and unprofitable as it appeared (he did not even pretend to himself that it would lead anywhere, since what faint illumination he might strike from it could only refer to the past), he was seldom tired of searching for them.

A hard March, cited generally as the coldest within the memory of a generation, following a winter of fog and rain, had made him an inveterate prisoner within the four walls of his apartment.  He had, indeed, the run of others at this time, for the Bullens had left him (at the last there had been no question of little Margot’s appropriation; Rainham had taken it so serenely for granted that she would remain with him), but this was a privilege of which he did not avail himself.  And the place, stripped of all its commercial attributes, had fallen into an immense desuetude, to which the charm of silence, and of a deeper solitude than it had ever possessed before, was attached.

The dock gates were finally closed; a hard frost of many days’ duration had almost hermetically sealed them, and the drip of Thames water through the sluices formed immediately into long, fantastic stalactites of clear ice.  Rainham found it difficult to believe, at times, that the bustle of the wharves, the roar of maritime London, still went on at his elbows, the deserted yard cast such a panoply of silence round him.  It was as though he had fallen suddenly from the midst of men into some wholly abandoned region, a land of perpetual snows.  It symbolized well for him the fantastic separation which he had suffered from the rest of the world; so that, but for the painter Oswyn, who was a constant visitor, and had, indeed, since the departure of the Bullens, a room set apart for him in the house, he might have been already dead and buried, and his old life would not have seemed more remote.  And if he found the atmosphere of Blackpool, more often than not, to be of soothing quality, or at least a harmonious setting to the long and aimless course of introspection on which he had embarked, there were also times when it had a certain terror for him.

It came upon him in the evening, as a rule, when Margot had been carried away to bed by the hard-featured old woman who had succeeded Mrs. Bullen in the superintendence of his household; for the child, with her sweet, shrill voice and her infantile chatter, had come to seem to him far more even than Oswyn, about whom there would always lurk something shadowy and unreal, a last link with the living; when the tide was nearly out, so that the stillness was not even broken by the long, lugubrious syren of a passing steamer, his isolation was borne in upon him with something of the sting of sharp, physical pain.