. It was closed, but her address was given him; a bank in Cape Town.
He had received his release. In his remorse and relief, so confusing and
so poignant, he heard the driver of the cab asking where he wanted to go
now. "Oh, back again!" But before they had gone a mile he corrected the
address, in an impulse of which next moment he felt thoroughly ashamed.
What he was doing indeed, was as indecent as if he were driving from the
funeral of his wife to the boudoir of another woman. When he reached the
old Square, and the words "To let" stared him in the face, he felt a
curious relief, though it meant that he would not see her whom to see for
ten minutes he felt he would give a year of life. Dismissing his cab, he
stood debating whether to ring the bell. The sight of a maid's face at
the window decided him. Mr. Pierson was out, and the young ladies were
away. He asked for Mrs. Laird's address, and turned away, almost into
the arms of Pierson himself. The greeting was stiff and strange. 'Does
he know that Leila's gone?' he thought. 'If so, he must think me the
most awful skunk. And am I? Am I?' When he reached home, he sat down to
write to Leila. But having stared at the paper for an hour and written
these three lines--

"MY DEAR LEILA, "I cannot express to you the feelings with which I
received your letter--"

he tore it up. Nothing would be adequate, nothing would be decent. Let
the dead past bury its dead--the dead past which in his heart had never
been alive! Why pretend? He had done his best to keep his end up. Why
pretend?

PART IV

I

In the boarding-house, whence the Lairds had not yet removed, the old
lady who knitted, sat by the fireplace, and light from the setting sun
threw her shadow on the wall, moving spidery and grey, over the yellowish
distemper, in time to the tune of her needles. She was a very old
lady--the oldest lady in the world, Noel thought--and she knitted without
stopping, without breathing, so that the girl felt inclined to scream.
In the evening when George and Gratian were not in, Noel would often sit
watching the needles, brooding over her as yet undecided future. And now
and again the old lady would look up above her spectacles; move the
corners of her lips ever so slightly, and drop her gaze again. She had
pitted herself against Fate; so long as she knitted, the war could not
stop--such was the conclusion Noel had come to. This old lady knitted
the epic of