trial--without knowing what it so dazzlingly masked; for a social
relation it had become with a vengeance when it drove him about the
place as now at his hours of freedom (and he actually and recklessly
took, all demoralised and unstrung and unfit either for work or for
anything else, other liberties that would get him into trouble) under
this queer torment of irreconcilable things, a bewildered consciousness
of tenderness and patience and cruelty, of great evident mystifying
facts that were as little to be questioned as to be conceived or
explained, and that were yet least, withal, to be lost sight of.

On that Sunday night he had wandered wild, incoherently ranging and
throbbing, but this became the law of his next days as well, since he
lacked more than ever all other resort or refuge and had nowhere to
carry, to deposit, or contractedly let loose and lock up, as it were,
his swollen consciousness, which fairly split in twain the raw shell of
his sordid little boarding-place. The arch of the sky and the spread of
sea and shore alone gave him space; he could roam with himself anywhere,
in short, far or near--he could only never take himself back. That
certitude--that this was impossible to him even should she wait there
among her plushes and bronzes ten years--was the thing he kept
closest clutch of; it did wonders for what he would have called his
self-respect. Exactly as he had left her so he would stand off--even
though at moments when he pulled up sharp somewhere to put himself an
intensest question his heart almost stood still. The days of the week
went by, and as he had left her she stayed; to the extent, that is, of
his having neither sight nor sound of her, and of the failure of
every sign. It took nerve, he said, not to return to her, even for
curiosity--since how, after all, in the name of wonder, had she invested
the fruits of her extortion to such advantage, there being no chapter
of all the obscurity of the years to beat that for queer-ness? But
he dropped, tired to death, on benches, half a dozen times an
evening--exactly on purpose to recognise that the nerve required was
just the nerve he had.

As the days without a token from her multiplied he came in as well for
hours--and these indeed mainly on the bench of desolation--of sitting
stiff and stark in presence of the probability that he had lost
everything for ever. When he passed the Royal he never turned an
eyelash, and when he met Captain Roper on