etting everyone and everything else.

In all of this his grandmother played her part. He was aware that behind
all the attraction that he had had for Rachel was the consciousness that
he was a rebel against the Duchess--they were rebels together--that, he
knew, was the way that she thought of it.

He was aware, however, that he was a rebel only because he was forced to
be one. Let his grandmother hold out her old arms to him and into them
he would run! He would be restored to the family--horribly he wanted it!
The spirit with which he had returned to England was one of hot
vengeance that would, indeed, have suited the finest of Rachel's moods,
but that spirit had, he knew, subtly changed--Here then, with regard to
Rachel, he felt a traitor--Would she come to him, why then he would do
anything for her even to pulling the Duchess's nose--but if she would
not come to him, why then he would rather that the Beaminsters should
take him to themselves and make him one of them.

But he felt--although he had no tangible arguments to support his
feeling--that the old lady was "round the corner"--"she knows, you bet,
all about things--what I'd give for just one talk with her.... I believe
we'd be friends----"

His weakness of character came, as he himself knew, from his inability
to allow life to stay at a good safe dull level. "To-day's
dull--Something _must_ happen before evening; I must _make_ it happen,"
and then he would go and do something foolish--

London excited him--the lighted shops, the smell of food and flowers and
women and leather and tobacco, the sky--signs flashing from space to
space, the carts and omnibuses, the shouts and cries and sudden
silences, the confused life of the place so that you could never say,
"_This_ is London," but could only, in retrospect say, "Ah, _that_ must
have been London," and still know that you had failed to grasp its
secret.

The dirt and shabbiness and lack of plan and good humour and crime and
indecency and priggishness--its life!

Many things out of all this glory called him--racing, women, drink, the
gutter one minute, the stars the next--from them all he held himself
aloof because of Rachel ... and Rachel meanwhile perhaps did not care.

As Christmas approached he became utterly obsessed by this one
thought--that he must have a letter. His obsession had been able, during
these weeks, to clutch the tighter in that he had seen nothing of
Lizzie Rand. Throughout the autumn h