ind lying there
on the green tablecloth, the letter--In the morning his man appeared
with a jug of hot water in one hand and the letters in the other--There,
one of those tantalizing, mysterious envelopes, must be the letter.

At first disappointment was reassured with "Oh! it will be there
to-morrow." But as the days passed and the silence grew the torture
developed. Now after that first search in the morning, after that swift
sharp glance to the green tablecloth came physical pain--sickened heavy
drooping of the spirits when the world looked one vast deserted plain of
monotonous dullness, when the hours and hours and days and days that yet
remained to life seemed intolerable in their dreary multitude.

He would go to bed early in order that the morning letters might come
the sooner; he fled home from the City, his heart beating like a drum,
as he mounted his stairs.

Only one line, one line, would have been sufficient. It needed only the
reassurance that she thought of him, that she still cared ... _such_ a
short letter would have given him all the comfort he needed.

The need for some sign came as much from his impatience with the whole
situation as from his love for Rachel, but this, because he always saw
himself as a fine coloured centre of some passionate crisis, he
naturally did not perceive. His whole idea of Rachel was, as the days
passed, increasingly a picture that was far enough from reality--On the
one side Rachel--on the other side his restoration to his family ... now
as he waited it seemed to him that he was in danger of losing both the
one thing and the other.

There was nothing that so speedily drove Breton to frenzy as enforced
inaction.

After all, they had been together so little--

Breton was cursed with his imagination. All his instability of character
came from his imagination. He looked ahead and saw such wonderful
events, he knew why people did this or that; he could see so clearly
what would happen did he act in such and such a way.... He traced future
action through many hazardous windings into a safe, fair Haven, and for
the sake of the Haven embarked on the preliminary dangers--discovered,
of course, too late, that the Haven was a dream. He saw Rachel now,
sitting alone, thinking of him, loving him, forcing herself to be fair
to her blockhead of a husband, feeling at last that she could endure it
no longer, and so writing! or he saw her falling in love with that same
blockhead, forg