sad strange pleasure in making the
contrast between the one picture and the other as vivid as possible.
Death and silence on the one side--oh, how true and how irreparable! But
on the other, he forced on his imagination till it drew for him an
image of youth and beauty so glowing that it almost charmed the sting out
of his grief. The English paper which he succeeded in getting at Calais
contained the announcement: 'Miss Bretherton has, we are glad to say,
completely recovered from the effects of the fainting fit which so much
alarmed the audience at the _Calliope_ last week. She was able to play
_Elvira_ as usual last night, and was greeted by a large and sympathetic
house.' He read it, and turned the page hastily, as if what the paragraph
suggested was wholly distasteful to him. He refused altogether to think
of her as weak or suffering; he shrank from his own past misgivings, his
own prophecies about her. The world would be a mere dark prison-house if
her bright beauty were over-clouded! She was not made for death, and she
should stand to him as the image of all that escapes and resists and
defies that tyrant of our years, and pain, his instrument and herald.

He reached London in the midst of a rainy fog. The endless black streets
stretched before him in the dreary December morning like so many roads
into the nether regions; the gas-lamps scattered an unseasonable light
through the rain and fog; it was the quintessence of murky, cheerless
winter.

He reached his own rooms, and found his man up and waiting for him, and a
meal ready. It was but three days since he had been last there, the open
telegram was still lying on the table. One of his first acts was to put
it hastily out of sight. Over his breakfast he planned his embassy to
Miss Bretherton. The best time to find her alone, he imagined, would be
about mid-day, and in the interval he would put his books and papers to
rights. They lay scattered about--books, proofs, and manuscript. As his
orderly hands went to work upon them, he was conscious that he had never
been so remote from all that they represented. But his nature was
faithful and tenacious, and under the outward sense of detachment there
was an inward promise of return. 'I will come back to you,' seemed to be
the cry of his thought. 'You shall be my only friends. But first I must
see her, and all my heart is hers!'

The morning dragged away, and at half-past eleven he went out, carrying
the little case