nd the victim seemed alone in
a world of unreality, and she loved him absolutely, perhaps for half an
hour.

In the morning she was gone. The note that she left, tender and
hysterical in tone, and intended to be most kind, hurt her lover
terribly. It was as if some work of art had been broken by him, some
picture in the National Gallery slashed out of its frame. When he
recalled her talents and her social position, he felt that the first
passer-by had a right to shoot him down. He was afraid of the waitress
and the porters at the railway-station. He was afraid at first of his
wife, though later he was to regard her with a strange new tenderness,
and to think, "There is nothing to choose between us, after all."

The expedition to Shropshire crippled the Basts permanently. Helen
in her flight forgot to settle the hotel bill, and took their return
tickets away with her; they had to pawn Jacky's bangles to get home, and
the smash came a few days afterwards. It is true that Helen offered him
five thousand pounds, but such a sum meant nothing to him. He could not
see that the girl was desperately righting herself, and trying to save
something out of the disaster, if it was only five thousand pounds. But
he had to live somehow. He turned to his family, and degraded himself to
a professional beggar. There was nothing else for him to do.

"A letter from Leonard," thought Blanche, his sister; "and after all
this time." She hid it, so that her husband should not see, and when he
had gone to his work read it with some emotion, and sent the prodigal a
little money out of her dress allowance.

"A letter from Leonard!" said the other sister, Laura, a few days later.
She showed it to her husband. He wrote a cruel, insolent reply, but sent
more money than Blanche, so Leonard soon wrote to him again.

And during the winter the system was developed.

Leonard realised that they need never starve, because it would be too
painful for his relatives. Society is based on the family, and the
clever wastrel can exploit this indefinitely. Without a generous thought
on either side, pounds and pounds passed. The donors disliked Leonard,
and he grew to hate them intensely. When Laura censured his immoral
marriage, he thought bitterly, "She minds that! What would she say if
she knew the truth?" When Blanche's husband offered him work, he found
some pretext for avoiding it. He had wanted work keenly at Oniton, but
too much anxiety had shattered h