urant.

END OF BOOK II.

BOOK III.

CHAPTER I.

Had the transition from bachelorhood to the married state been less
easy and less quickly achieved, Morgan might perhaps have realised
that the pattern of life he was weaving had not the same
undetachedness from the real as a pattern woven in dream, but that it
was a part and parcel of the real. As it was, he was not the man to
stop and think, once he had made his plunge into the strange, vague
future that had appealed to him. And now this theatrical enterprise,
with Cleo as the star, loomed ahead of him not only as the redemption
of his empty life, but wrapped in that seductive romance which his
mood and temperament demanded.

For the present, they had taken furnished rooms in Bloomsbury, where
they lived under an assumed name. Morgan did not leave his new address
at his old quarters, for he did not want any letters to follow him, no
matter from whom they came. He felt he had done all he could in
writing the three letters he had decided to write. And with the
sending of those letters, he seemed to be detaching himself from his
old life with one clean cut; his imagination left free to construct
the tableaux of what he believed--such was the impression Cleo's
personality had made on him--was going to be a gorgeous panoramic
future, a triumphant historic march through the civilised world. The
fact that Cleo now went about clothed like any other mortal did not
detract from his estimate of her genius, for the mere dispensation
with such extraneous splendour left untouched the splendour of the
woman herself.

And, from this mere moving from one London street to another, he had
all the feeling of having placed a thousand miles between himself and
everybody who knew him. In the theatrical enterprise he was to figure
under his present assumed name, though that was only likely to come
within the public cognizance as the name borne by Cleo's husband, a
personage none of his friends would think of associating with himself.
He thought he might thus fairly count on remaining undiscovered,
though, of course, he could not provide against chance encounters. But
he felt he would be very angry if any attempt were made to follow him
up and interfere in any way with the destiny he had chosen.

Meanwhile, with an exaggerated sense of his own helplessness, he
looked up to Cleo with an unshakable confidence, placing an oracular
value on her every word. She symbolised for hi