d at him with contempt but no very active hostility.

"I was simply telling you something that I thought you ought to know,"
she said. "It is what everybody is saying--that you and she have been
meeting every day for weeks, sitting in the Park after dark together,
going to the theatre. People draw their own conclusions, I suppose."

"How much have you told father of this?" he demanded.

"I don't know at all what father has heard," she answered.

"You've been that girl's enemy since the first moment that she came
here," he continued, growing angrier and angrier at her quiet
indifference. "Now you're trying to damage her character."

"On the contrary," she answered, "I told you because I thought you
ought to know what people were saying. The girl doesn't matter to me
one way or another--but I'm sorry for her if she thinks she cares for
you. That won't bring her much happiness."

Then suddenly her impassivity had a strange effect upon him. He could
not answer her. He left them both, and went up to his room.

As soon as he had closed the door of his bedroom he knew that his bad
time was come upon him. It was a physical as well as a spiritual
dominion. The room visibly darkened before his eyes, his brain worked
as it would in dreams suggesting its own thoughts and wishes and
intentions. A dark shadow hung over him, hands were placed upon his
eyes, only one thought came before him again and again and again. "You
know, you have long known, that you are doomed to make miserable
everything that you touch, to ruin every one with whom you come in
contact. That is your fate, and you can no more escape from it than you
can escape from your body!"

How many hours of this kind he had known in Spain, in France, in South
America. Often at the very moment when he had thought that he was at
last settling down to some decent steady plan of life he would be
jerked from his purpose, some delay or failure would frustrate him, and
there would follow the voice in his ear and the hands on his eyes.

It was indeed as though he had been pledged to something in his early
life, and because he had broken from that pledge had been pursued ever
since ...

He stripped to the waist and bathed in cold water; even then it seemed
to him that his flesh was heavy and dull and yellow, that he was
growing obese and out of all condition. He put on a clean shirt and
collar, sat down on his bed and tried to think the thing out. To
whomsoever he had done