embling with suppressed passion.

"That is all, then," the other concluded. "You know where to send
or bring the chart when you have it? If you bring it yourself, it
is possible that something which you may regard as a reward, will be
offered to you."

Lessingham rose a little wearily to his feet. His farewell to Hayter was
cold and lifeless.

He left the hotel and started on his homeward way, struggling with a
sense of intolerable depression. The streets through which he passed
were sombre and unlit.

A Zeppelin warning, a few hours before, had driven the people to their
homes. There was not a chink of light to be seen anywhere. An intense
and gloomy stillness seemed to brood over the deserted thoroughfares.
Nightbirds on their way home flitted by like shadows. Policemen lurked
in the shadows of the houses. The few vehicles left crawled about with
insufficient lights. Even the warning horns of the taxicab men sounded
furtive and repressed. Lessingham, as he marched stolidly along, felt
curiously in sympathy with his environment. Hayter's news brought him
face to face with that inner problem which had so suddenly become the
dominant factor in his life. For the first time he knew what love was.
He felt the wonder of it, the far-reaching possibilities, the strange
idealism called so unexpectedly into being. He recognized the vagaries
of Philippa's disposition, and yet, during the last few days, he had
convinced himself that she was beginning to care. Her strained relations
with her husband had been, without a doubt, her first incentive towards
the acceptance of his proffered devotion. Now he told himself with eager
hopefulness that some portion of it, however minute, must be for his own
sake. The relations between husband and wife, he reminded himself, must,
at any rate, have been strained during the last few months, or Cranston
would never have been able to keep his secret. In his gloomy passage
through this land of ill omens, however, he shivered a little as he
thought of the other possibility--tortured himself with imagining what
might happen during her revulsion of feeling, if Philippa discovered the
truth. A sense of something greater than he had yet known in life seemed
to lift him into some lofty state of aloofness, from which he could
look down and despise himself, the poor, tired plodder wearing the heavy
chains of duty. There was a life so much more wonderful, just the other
side of the clouds, a very short