Life dragged.
Too much had been taken out of his life all at once; for, in the first place, the family had been drawn together more during the trouble which Lali's advent had brought; then the child and its mother, his pupil, were gone also.

He wandered about in a kind of vague unrest.

The hardest thing in this world to get used to is the absence of a familiar footstep and the cheerful greeting of a familiar eye.

And the man with no chick or child feels even the absence of his dog from the hearth-rug when he returns from a journey or his day's work.

It gives him a sense of strangeness and loss.