And why shouldn't they live here, Allan and she?
The thought of this dispelled the cloud which hung over the years he saw ahead.

How smoothly things were working out.

The monstrous new buildings around his house seemed to him to draw back as though balked of their prey.
On the mantle in Roger's study, for many years a bronze figure there, "The Thinker," huge and naked, forbidding in its crouching pose, the heavy chin on one clenched fist, had brooded down upon him.

And in the years that had been so dark, it had been a figure of despair.

Often he had looked up from his chair and grimly met its frowning gaze.