le already!'

'Did it hurt her so much?' asked Langham almost inaudibly, turning away,
Robert's tone meanwhile calling up a new and scorching image in the
subtle brain tissue.

'I have not seen her,' said Robert abruptly; 'but when I came in I found
my wife--who has no light tears--weeping for her sister.'

His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in truth too
pitiful and too intimate for speech.

Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask again.

'Good-bye!' said Robert, taking up his hat with a dismal sense of having
got foolishly through a fool's errand. 'As I said to you before, what
Rose's feeling is at this moment I cannot even guess. Very likely she
would be the first to repudiate half of what I have been saying. And I
see that you will not talk to me--you will not take me into your
confidence and speak to me not only as her brother but as your friend.
And--and--are you going? What does this mean?'

He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases.

'I am going back to Oxford,' said the other briefly. 'I cannot stay in
these rooms, in these streets.'

Robert was sore perplexed. What real--nay, what terrible suffering--in
the face and manner, and yet how futile, how needless! He felt himself
wrestling with something intangible and phantom-like, wholly
unsubstantial, and yet endowed with a ghastly indefinite power over
human life.

'It is very hard,' he said hurriedly, moving nearer, 'that our old
friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a little! You are
always undervaluing yourself. Why not take a friend into council
sometimes when you sit in judgment on yourself and your possibilities?
Your own perceptions are all warped!'

Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the most beautiful and
one of the most irrelevant things he had ever seen.

'I will write to you, Elsmere,' he said, holding out his hand, 'speech
is impossible to me. I never had any words except through my pen.'

Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left alone.

But he did no more packing for hours. He spent the middle of the day
sitting dumb and immovable in his chair. Imagination was at work again
more feverishly than ever. He was tortured by a fixed image of Rose,
suffering and paling.

And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus of
this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married
life the night before. He was all at sea, bare