Sylvie and Bruno Concluded

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CHAPTER I.
BRUNO’S LESSONS.


During the next month or two my solitary town-life seemed, by contrast,
unusually dull and tedious. I missed the pleasant friends I had left
behind at Elveston—the genial interchange of thought—the sympathy which
gave to one’s ideas a new and vivid reality: but, perhaps more than all,
I missed the companionship of the two Fairies—or Dream-Children, for I
had not yet solved the problem as to who or what they were—whose sweet
playfulness had shed a magic radiance over my life.

In office-hours—which I suppose reduce most men to the mental condition
of a coffee-mill or a mangle—time sped along much as usual: it was in
the pauses of life, the desolate hours when books and newspapers palled
on the sated appetite, and when, thrown back upon one’s own dreary
musings, one strove—all in vain—to people the vacant air with the dear
faces of absent friends, that the real bitterness of solitude made
itself felt.

One evening, feeling my life a little more wearisome than usual, I
strolled down to my Club, not so much with the hope of meeting any
friend there, for London was now ‘out of town,’ as with the feeling that
here, at least, I should hear ‘sweet words of human speech,’ and come
into contact with human thought.

However, almost the first face I saw there was that of a friend. Eric
Lindon was lounging, with rather a ‘bored’ expression of face, over a
newspaper; and we fell into conversation with a mutual satisfaction
which neither of us tried to conceal.