rnt her surname--he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar
soon after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had
gone. He never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.

Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But
Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock
to Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would
seem there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that
the two had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It
was almost as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go.
Then came regret, a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with
every mile of distance.

In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours
there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy
with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious
secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant
resemblance to Anna....

In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back.
"But now I had the damned frontier," he wrote, "between us."

It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the
"damned frontier" tip the balance against him.

Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it
seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured. "I can't stand this
business," he wrote. "It has things in it, possibilities of emotional
disturbance--you can have no idea! In the train--luckily I was alone in
the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it,
I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and
stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is
disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....

"Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you
about my dismal feelings...."

After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but
to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable
regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of
his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.

"There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris," he wrote. "A levity.
I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet undescribed
radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those
tear-compelling German emanations....

"And, Ben