These reflexions, as I say, quickened his generosity; yet,
make them as he might, he saw himself, with the lapse of the
period, more and more disconcerted. It lapsed for him with a
strange steady sweep, and the oddest oddity was that it gave him,
independently of the threat of much inconvenience, almost the only
positive surprise his career, if career it could be called, had yet
offered him. She kept the house as she had never done; he had to
go to her to see her--she could meet him nowhere now, though there
was scarce a corner of their loved old London in which she hadn't
in the past, at one time or another, done so; and he found her
always seated by her fire in the deep old-fashioned chair she was
less and less able to leave. He had been struck one day, after an
absence exceeding his usual measure, with her suddenly looking much
older to him than he had ever thought of her being; then he
recognised that the suddenness was all on his side--he had just
simply and suddenly noticed. She looked older because inevitably,
after so many years, she WAS old, or almost; which was of course
true in still greater measure of her companion.
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