Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (Illustrated)

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.