I did not see him again for nearly a week.Then he fetched me soon after seven one evening and took me out to dinner.He was dressed in the deepest mourning,and on his bowler was a broad black band.He had even a black border to his handkerchief.His garb of woe suggested that he had lost in one catastrophe every relation he had in the world,even to cousins by marriage twice removed.His plumpness and his red,fat cheeks made his mourning not a little incongruous.It was cruel that his extreme unhappiness should have in it something of buffoonery.

　　He told me he had made up his mind to go away,though not to Italy,as I had suggested,but to Holland.

　　‘Im starting tomorrow.This is perhaps the last time we shall ever meet.’

　　I made an appropriate rejoinder,and he smiled wanly.

　　‘I havent been home for five years.I think Id forgotten it all;I seemed to have come so far away from my fathers house that I was shy at the idea of revisiting it;but now I feel its my only refuge.’

　　He was sore and bruised,and his thoughts went back to the tenderne......