ible that Maurice
could be "tremendously worried" by anything.

"I want you to arrange matters," said Michael. "I can't go near the
place again. She will probably prefer to go away from Ararat House. The
rent is paid up to the June quarter. The furniture you can do what you
like with. Bring some of it here. Sell the rest, and give her the money.
Get rid of the woman who's there--Miss Harper her name is."

"But I shall feel rather awkward...."

"Oh, don't do it. Don't do it, then!" Michael broke in fretfully. "I'll
ask Guy."

"You're getting awfully irascible," Maurice complained. "Of course I'll
do anything you want, if you won't always jump down my throat at the
first word I utter. What has happened, though?"

"What do you expect to happen when you're engaged to a girl like that?"
Michael asked.

Maurice shrugged his shoulders.

"Oh, well, of course I should expect to be badly let down. But then, you
see, I'm not a very great believer in women. What are you going to do
yourself?"

"I haven't settled yet. I've got to arrange one or two things in town,
and then I shall go abroad. Would you be able to come with me in about a
week?"

"I daresay I might," Maurice answered, looking vaguely round the room.
Already, Michael thought, the subject was floating away from his facile
comprehension.

The piano had stopped, and conversation became general again.

"This is where you ought to be, if you want to write," Maurice
proclaimed to Guy. "It's ridiculous for you to bury yourself in the
country. You'll expire of stagnation."

"Just at present I recommend you to stay where you are," said Castleton.
"I'm almost expiring from the violence with which I am being
precipitated from one to another of Maurice's energies."

Soon afterward Michael and Guy left the studio and walked home; and next
morning Guy went back to Wychford.

Michael was astonished at his own calmness. After the first shock of the
betrayal he had gone and talked to a lot of people; he had coldly made
financial arrangements; he had even met and rather liked a man whom only
yesterday morning he could not have regarded without hatred for the part
he had played in Lily's life. Perhaps he had lost the power to feel
anything deeply for long; perhaps he was become a sort of Maurice;
already Lily seemed a shade of the underworld, merely more clearly
remembered than the others. Yet in the moment that he was calling her a
shade his present emotion proved that