The yellow book: an illustrated quarterly (3.1894)

Second Thoughts

By Arthur Moore

I
AS the clock struck eight Sir Geoffrey Vincent cast aside the
yy dull society journal with which he had been beguiling the
solitude of his after-dinner coffee and cigar, and abandoned, with
an alacrity eloquent of long boredom, his possession of one of the
capacious chairs which invited repose in the dingy smoking-room
of an old-fashioned club. It had been reserved for him, after
twenty monotonous years of almost unbroken exile, spent, for the
most part, amid the jungles and swamps of Lower Burma, to
realise that a friendless man, alone in the most populous city of the
world, may encounter among thousands of his peers a desolation
more supreme than the solitude of the most ultimate wilderness ;
and he found himself wondering, a little savagely, why, after all,
he had expected his home-coming to be so different from the
reality that now confronted him. When he landed at Brindisi, a
short ten days ago, misgivings had already assailed him vaguely ;
the fact that he was practically homeless, that, although not
altogether bereft of kith and kin, he had no family circle to
welcome him as an addition to its circumference, had made it
inevitable that his rapid passage across the Continent should be
haunted