t month or two I lived like a tramp.
Will you make my debt to you a round hundred? It shall be repaid, though
I may be a year or two about it.'

The loan was granted, but together with a great deal of unpalatable
counsel. Having found his lodging, Tarrant at once invested ten pounds
in providing himself with a dress suit, and improving his ordinary
attire,--he had sold every garment he could spare in New York. For
the dress suit he had an immediate use; on the very platform of Euston
Station, at his arrival, a chance meeting with one of his old college
friends resulted in an invitation to dine, and, even had not policy
urged him to make the most of such acquaintances, he was in no mood for
rejecting a summons back into the world of civilisation. Postponing the
purposed letter to Nancy (which, had he written it sooner, would have
been very unlike the letter he subsequently sent), he equipped himself
once more as a gentleman, and spent several very enjoyable hours in
looking up the members of his former circle--Hodiernals and others. Only
to Harvey Munden did he confide something of the anxieties which lay
beneath his assumed lightheartedness. Munden was almost the only man he
knew for whom he had a genuine respect.

Renewal of intercourse with people of good social standing made him
more than ever fretful in the thought that he had clogged himself with
marriage. Whatever Nancy's reply to his announcement that he was home
again, he would have read it with discontent. To have the fact forced
upon him (a fact he seriously believed it) that his wife could not be
depended upon even for elementary generosity of thought, was at this
moment especially disastrous; it weighed the balance against his
feelings of justice and humanity, hitherto, no matter how he acted,
always preponderant over the baser issues of character and circumstance.

He stood leaning upon the parapet of Westminster Bridge, his eyes
scanning the dark facade of the Houses of Parliament.

How would the strong, unscrupulous, really ambitious man act in such
a case? What was to prevent him from ignoring the fact that he was
married, and directing his course precisely as he would have done
if poverty had come upon him before his act of supreme foolishness?
Journalism must have been his refuge then, as now; but Society would
have held out to him the hope of every adventurer--a marriage with
some woman whose wealth and connections would clear an upward path
in wh