Now it blew wet and gustily from south-west, sighing through the pines and Scotch firs in the Wilderness.

A strand of the yellow Banksia rose, trained against the house wall, breaking loose, scratched and tapped at the window-panes with anxious appealing little noises.
Many years had elapsed since Charles Verity spent a night upstairs in this part of the house, and by degrees those outdoor sounds attracted his attention as intimately familiar.

They carried him back to his boyhood, to the spacious dreams and projects of adolescence.

He could remember just such gusty wet winds swishing through the trees, such petulant fingering of errant creepers upon the windows, when he stayed here during the holidays from school at Harchester, on furlough from his regiment, and, later, on long leave from India, during his wonderful little great-uncle's lifetime.
And his thought took a lighter and friendlier vein, recalling that polished, polite, encyclopedic minded and witty gentleman, who had lived to within a few months of his full century with a maximum of interest and entertainment to himself, and a minimum of injury or offence to others.
To the last he retained his freshness of intellectual outlook, his insatiable yet discreet curiosity.

Taking it as a whole, should his life be judged a singularly futile or singularly enviable one?
Nothing feminine, save on strictly platonic lines, was recorded to have entered it at any period.