ht bitterly,
and would take her place among his quiet enemies, if ever the day of
reckoning should come. It was scandalous, it was banal to have abused
her trust and courtesy. Oh, it was hopeless to struggle any more! The
fates were against him. They had played him a trick. He was to be their
transitory sport, as many a better man he could himself recollect had
been before him. He would go home and give in; let Sheila do with him
what she pleased. No one but a lunatic could have acted as he had, with
just that frantic hint of method so remarkable in the insane.

He left the common. A lamplighter was lighting the lamps. A thin
evening haze was on the air. If only he had stayed at home that fateful
afternoon! Who, what had induced him, enticed him to venture out? And
even with the thought welled up into his mind an intense desire to go
to the old green time-worn churchyard again; to sit there contentedly
alone, where none heeded the completest metamorphosis, down beside the
yew-trees. What a fool he had been. There alone, of course, lay his only
possible chance of recovery. He would go to-morrow. Perhaps Sheila had
not yet discovered his absence; and there would be no difficulty in
repeating so successful a stratagem.

Remembrance of his miserable mistake, of Miss Sinnet, faintly returned
to him as he swiftly mounted the steps to his porch. Poor old lady. He
would make amends for his discourtesy when he was quite himself again.
She should some day hear, perhaps, his infinitely tragic, infinitely
comic experience from his own lips. He would take her some flowers, some
old keepsake of his mother's. What would he not do when the old moods
and brains of the stupid Arthur Lawford, whom he had appreciated so
little and so superficially, came back to him.

He ran up the steps and stopped dead, his hand in his pocket, chilled
and aghast. Sheila had taken his keys. He stood there, dazed and still,
beneath the dim yellow of his own fanlight; and once again that inward
spring flew back. 'Brazen it out; brazen it out! Knock and ring!'

He knocked flamboyantly, and rang.

There came a quiet step and the door opened. 'Dr Simon, of course, has
called?' he inquired suavely.

'Yes, sir.'

'Ah, and gone'--as I feared. And Mrs Lawford?'

'I think Mrs Lawford is in, sir.'

Lawford put out a detaining hand. 'We will not disturb her; we will not
disturb her. I can find my way up; oh yes, thank you!'

But Ada still palely barred the