have been so cruel. A sudden fear got him on his feet again and into
the passage, where stood a cupboard in which he kept his clothes. He
opened it and gave a sigh of relief. She had apparently forgotten it and
none of his things was touched.

He went back into the sitting-room and, surveying the scene, wondered what
to do; he had not the heart to begin trying to set things straight;
besides there was no food in the house, and he was hungry. He went out and
got himself something to eat. When he came in he was cooler. A little pang
seized him as he thought of the child, and he wondered whether she would
miss him, at first perhaps, but in a week she would have forgotten him;
and he was thankful to be rid of Mildred. He did not think of her with
wrath, but with an overwhelming sense of boredom.

"I hope to God I never see her again," he said aloud.

The only thing now was to leave the rooms, and he made up his mind to give
notice the next morning. He could not afford to make good the damage done,
and he had so little money left that he must find cheaper lodgings still.
He would be glad to get out of them. The expense had worried him, and now
the recollection of Mildred would be in them always. Philip was impatient
and could never rest till he had put in action the plan which he had in
mind; so on the following afternoon he got in a dealer in second-hand
furniture who offered him three pounds for all his goods damaged and
undamaged; and two days later he moved into the house opposite the
hospital in which he had had rooms when first he became a medical student.
The landlady was a very decent woman. He took a bed-room at the top, which
she let him have for six shillings a week; it was small and shabby and
looked on the yard of the house that backed on to it, but he had nothing
now except his clothes and a box of books, and he was glad to lodge so
cheaply.

XCVIII

And now it happened that the fortunes of Philip Carey, of no consequence
to any but himself, were affected by the events through which his country
was passing. History was being made, and the process was so significant
that it seemed absurd it should touch the life of an obscure medical
student. Battle after battle, Magersfontein, Colenso, Spion Kop, lost on
the playing fields of Eton, had humiliated the nation and dealt the
death-blow to the prestige of the aristocracy and gentry who till then had
found no one seriously to oppose their assertion that th