sed him.

As he sat moodily staring at the carpet its silly intricacies melted
into a blur from which the eyes of Mrs. Leath again looked out at him.
He saw the fine sweep of her brows, and the deep look beneath them as
she had turned from him on their last evening in London. "This will be
good-bye, then," she had said; and it occurred to him that her parting
phrase had been the same as Sophy Viner's.

At the thought he jumped to his feet and took down from its hook the
coat in which he had left Miss Viner's letter. The clock marked the
third quarter after midnight, and he knew it would make no difference
if he went down to the post-box now or early the next morning; but he
wanted to clear his conscience, and having found the letter he went to
the door.

A sound in the next room made him pause. He had become conscious again
that, a few feet off, on the other side of a thin partition, a small
keen flame of life was quivering and agitating the air. Sophy's face
came hack to him insistently. It was as vivid now as Mrs. Leath's had
been a moment earlier. He recalled with a faint smile of retrospective
pleasure the girl's enjoyment of her evening, and the innumerable fine
feelers of sensation she had thrown out to its impressions.

It gave him a curiously close sense of her presence to think that at
that moment she was living over her enjoyment as intensely as he was
living over his unhappiness. His own case was irremediable, but it was
easy enough to give her a few more hours of pleasure. And did she not
perhaps secretly expect it of him? After all, if she had been very
anxious to join her friends she would have telegraphed them on reaching
Paris, instead of writing. He wondered now that he had not been struck
at the moment by so artless a device to gain more time. The fact of her
having practised it did not make him think less well of her; it merely
strengthened the impulse to use his opportunity. She was starving, poor
child, for a little amusement, a little personal life--why not give
her the chance of another day in Paris? If he did so, should he not be
merely falling in with her own hopes?

At the thought his sympathy for her revived. She became of absorbing
interest to him as an escape from himself and an object about which his
thwarted activities could cluster. He felt less drearily alone because
of her being there, on the other side of the door, and in his gratitude
to her for giving him this relief he began, w