away from her when
perhaps she would need him most. And yet whenever he would come to this
point in his endless chain of thought, he would have to stop for a while,
overcome with such pain that his power of thinking was paralysed. He
would never, could never, be of service to her again. He had gone out of
her life, as she had gone out of his life; though she never had, nor
never could out of his thoughts. It was all over! All the years of
sweetness, of hope, and trust, and satisfied and justified faith in each
other, had been wiped out by that last terrible, cruel meeting. Oh! how
could she have said such things to him! How could she have thought them!
And there she was now in all the agony of her unrestrained passion. Well
he knew, from his long experience of her nature, how she must have
suffered to be in such a state of mind, to have so forgotten all the
restraint of her teaching and her life! Poor, poor Stephen! Fatherless
now as well as motherless; and friendless as well as fatherless! No one
to calm her in the height of her wild abnormal passion! No one to
comfort her when the fit had passed! No one to sympathise with her for
all that she had suffered! No one to help her to build new and better
hopes out of the wreck of her mad ideas! He would cheerfully have given
his life for her. Only last night he was prepared to kill, which was
worse than to die, for her sake. And now to be far away, unable to help,
unable even to know how she fared. And behind her eternally the shadow
of that worthless man who had spurned her love and flouted her to a
chance comer in his drunken delirium. It was too bitter to bear. How
could God lightly lay such a burden on his shoulders who had all his life
tried to walk in sobriety and chastity and in all worthy and manly ways!
It was unfair! It was unfair! If he could do anything for her?
Anything! Anything! . . . And so the unending whirl of thoughts went on!

The smoke of London was dim on the horizon when he began to get back to
practical matters. When the train drew up at Euston he stepped from it
as one to whom death would be a joyous relief!

He went to a quiet hotel, and from there transacted by letter such
business matters as were necessary to save pain and trouble to others. As
for himself, he made up his mind that he would go to Alaska, which he
took to be one of the best places in the as yet uncivilised world for a
man to lose his identity. As a secur