oing to the window which opened on a
balcony looking over St. James Street, threw it wide, and smoked a
cigarette leaning against the wall. It was on the whole a fine night and
warm, though the nip of the east wind was not yet out of the air. In the
street below there was still a good deal of movement, for it was only
just past midnight and the clubs were not yet empty. To his right the
turreted gate-house of the Palace with its clock rose dark against a sky
covered with light, windy cloud. Beyond it his eye sought instinctively
for the Clock Tower, which stood to-night dull and beaconless--like some
one in a stupid silence. That light of the sitting House had become to
him one of the standing pleasures of life. He had never yet been
honestly glad of its extinction.

"I'm a precious raw hand," he confessed to himself with a shake of the
head as he stood there smoking. "And it can't last--nothing does."

Presently he laid down his cigarette a moment on the edge of the
balcony, and, coming back into the room, opened a drawer, searched a
little, and finally took out a letter. He stooped over the lamp to read
it. It was the letter which Marcella Boyce had written him some two or
three days after the breach of her engagement. That fact was barely
mentioned at the beginning of it, without explanation or comment of any
kind. Then the letter continued:

"I have never yet thanked you as I ought for all that you have done and
attempted through these many weeks. But for them it must have been plain
to us both that we could never rightly meet again. I am very destitute
just now--and I cling to self-respect as though it were the only thing
left me. But that scene in the past, which put us both wrong with
honour and conscience, has surely been wiped out--_thought--suffered_
away. I feel that I dare now say to you, as I would to any other
co-worker and co-thinker--if in the future you ever want my work, if you
can set me, with others, to any task that wants doing and that I could
do--ask me, and I am not likely to refuse.

"But for the present I am going quite away into another world. I have
been more ill than I have ever been in my life this last few days, and
they are all, even my father, ready to agree with me that I must go. As
soon as I am a little stronger I am to have a year's training at a
London hospital, and then I shall probably live for a while in town and
nurse. This scheme occurred to me as I came back with the wife f