He walked for hours, and towards nightfall stood upon a
wooded hill, gazing westward. An overcast, yet not a gloomy sky;
still, soft-dappled; with rifts and shimmerings of pearly blue
scattered among multitudinous billows, which here were a dusky
yellow, there a deep neutral tint. In the low west, beneath the long
dark edge, a soft splendour, figured with airy cloudlets, waited for
the invisible descending sun. Moment after moment the rifts grew
longer, the tones grew warmer; above began to spread a rosy flush;
in front, the glory brightened, touching the cloud-line above it
with a tender crimson.
If all days could be like this! One could live so well, he thought,
in mere enjoyment of the beauty of earth and sky, all else
forgotten. Under this soft-dusking heaven, death was welcome rest,
and passion only a tender sadness.
He said to himself that he had grown old in hopeless love--only to
doubt in the end whether he had loved at all.
CHAPTER XXXI
The lad he employed in his office was run over by a cab one slippery
day, and all but killed. Piers visited him in the hospital, thus
seeing for the first time the interior of one of those houses of
pain, which he always disliked even to pass. The experience did not
help to brighten his mood; he lacked that fortunate temper of the
average man, which embraces as a positive good the less of two
evils. The long, grey, low-echoing ward, with its atmosphere of
antiseptics; the rows of little white camp-beds, an ominous screen
hiding this and that; the bloodless faces, the smothered groan, made
a memory that went about with him for many a day.
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