n they sat down the bell rang.

The footman, wondering, went up stairs to open the door, and found to
his astonishment Midwinter waiting alone on the threshold, and looking
(in the servant's opinion) miserably ill. He asked for a light, and,
saying he wanted nothing else, withdrew at once to his room. The footman
went back to his fellow-servants, and reported that something had
certainly happened to his master's friend.

On entering his room, Midwinter closed the door, and hurriedly filled a
bag with the necessaries for traveling. This done, he took from a
locked drawer, and placed in the breast pocket of his coat, some little
presents which Allan had given him--a cigar case, a purse, and a set
of studs in plain gold. Having possessed himself of these memorials, he
snatched up the bag and laid his hand on the door. There, for the first
time, he paused. There, the headlong haste of all his actions thus far
suddenly ceased, and the hard despair in his face began to soften: he
waited, with the door in his hand.

Up to that moment he had been conscious of but one motive that animated
him, but one purpose that he was resolute to achieve. "For Allan's
sake!" he had said to himself, when he looked back toward the fatal
landscape and saw his friend leaving him to meet the woman at the pool.
"For Allan's sake!" he had said again, when he crossed the open country
beyond the wood, and saw afar, in the gray twilight, the long line of
embankment and the distant glimmer of the railway lamps beckoning him
away already to the iron road.

It was only when he now paused before he closed the door behind him--it
was only when his own impetuous rapidity of action came for the first
time to a check, that the nobler nature of the man rose in protest
against the superstitious despair which was hurrying him from all that
he held dear. His conviction of the terrible necessity of leaving Allan
for Allan's good had not been shaken for an instant since he had seen
the first Vision of the Dream realized on the shores of the Mere. But
now, for the first time, his own heart rose against him in unanswerable
rebuke. "Go, if you must and will! but remember the time when you were
ill, and he sat by your bedside; friendless, and he opened his heart to
you--and write, if you fear to speak; write and ask him to forgive you,
before you leave him forever!"

The half-opened door closed again softly. Midwinter sat down at the
writing-table and took up the p