t. What was the use? Nothing was changed. That
black sling and the damaged hand in it stood for one of those hard facts
that no wishing, and no sentimentalising, and no remorse could get over.

"I wish to God I had let him alone!"

That now was the frequent and bitter cry of Falloden's inmost being.
Trouble and the sight of trouble--sorrow--and death--had been to him, as
to other men, sobering and astonishing facts. The most decisive effect
of them had been to make him vulnerable, to break through the hard
defences of pride and custom, so that he realised what he had done. And
this realisation was fast becoming a more acute and haunting thing than
anything else. It constantly drove out the poignant recollection of his
father's death, or the dull sense of financial loss and catastrophe.
Loss and catastrophe might be at some distant time made good. But what
could ever give Radowitz back his art--his career--his natural object in
life? The hatches of the present had just got to be closed over this
ugly, irreparable thing. "I can't undo it--nothing can ever be undone.
But I can't spend my life in repenting it; one must just go forward, and
not let that, or anything else, hamstring a man who has got his fight to
fight, and can't get out of it."

Undo it? No. But were no, even partial, amends possible?--nothing that
could be offered, or done, or said?--nothing that would give Constance
Bledlow pleasure, or change her opinion?--efface that shrinking in her,
of which he hated to think?

He cudgelled his brains, but could think of nothing.

Money, of course, was of no use, even if he still possessed it.
Radowitz, in all matters connected with money, was hypersensitive and
touchy. It was well known that he had private means; and it was
certainly probable that he was now the richer man of the two.

No--there was nothing to be done. He had maimed forever the vital,
energising impulse in another human being, and it could never be
repaired. "His poor music!--_murdered_"--the words from Constance
Bledlow's horror-stricken letter were always in his mind. And the day
after the inquest on Sir Arthur, he had had some conversation on the
medical points of his father's case, and on the light thrown on them by
Radowitz's evidence, with the doctor who was then attending Lady Laura,
and had, it appeared, been several times called in by Sorell during the
preceding weeks to see Radowitz and report on the progress of the hand.
"A bad busine