ly, but the two could not get an inch
across the great distance between them. The three of them were drifting
forward.

Dawes mended very slowly. He was in the convalescent home at Skegness at
Christmas, nearly well again. Paul went to the seaside for a few days.
His father was with Annie in Sheffield. Dawes came to Paul's lodgings.
His time in the home was up. The two men, between whom was such a big
reserve, seemed faithful to each other. Dawes depended on Morel now. He
knew Paul and Clara had practically separated.

Two days after Christmas Paul was to go back to Nottingham. The evening
before he sat with Dawes smoking before the fire.

"You know Clara's coming down for the day to-morrow?" he said.

The other man glanced at him.

"Yes, you told me," he replied.

Paul drank the remainder of his glass of whisky.

"I told the landlady your wife was coming," he said.

"Did you?" said Dawes, shrinking, but almost leaving himself in the
other's hands. He got up rather stiffly, and reached for Morel's glass.

"Let me fill you up," he said.

Paul jumped up.

"You sit still," he said.

But Dawes, with rather shaky hand, continued to mix the drink.

"Say when," he said.

"Thanks!" replied the other. "But you've no business to get up."

"It does me good, lad," replied Dawes. "I begin to think I'm right
again, then."

"You are about right, you know."

"I am, certainly I am," said Dawes, nodding to him.

"And Len says he can get you on in Sheffield."

Dawes glanced at him again, with dark eyes that agreed with everything
the other would say, perhaps a trifle dominated by him.

"It's funny," said Paul, "starting again. I feel in a lot bigger mess
than you."

"In what way, lad?"

"I don't know. I don't know. It's as if I was in a tangled sort of hole,
rather dark and dreary, and no road anywhere."

"I know--I understand it," Dawes said, nodding. "But you'll find it'll
come all right."

He spoke caressingly.

"I suppose so," said Paul.

Dawes knocked his pipe in a hopeless fashion.

"You've not done for yourself like I have," he said.

Morel saw the wrist and the white hand of the other man gripping the
stem of the pipe and knocking out the ash, as if he had given up.

"How old are you?" Paul asked.

"Thirty-nine," replied Dawes, glancing at him.

Those brown eyes, full of the consciousness of failure, almost pleading
for reassurance, for someone to re-establish the man in himself, to warm
h