ied to him. Then he met
her in the street. She cut him. He spoke to her. She passed on without a
reply. At last a dull fury took possession of him. Her treatment of him
was flagrantly unjust. He had wished the sculptor to die, but he had
allowed nature to accomplish her designs unaided, even to some extent
hampered and hindered by his medical skill and care. He loved Sydney
with the violence of a man whose emotions had been sedulously repressed
through youth, vanquished but not killed by ambition, and the need to
work for the realisation of that ambition. The tumults of early manhood,
never given fair play, now raged in his breast, from which they should
have been long since expelled, and played havoc with every creed of
sense, and every built-up theory of wisdom and experience. Fane became
by degrees a monomaniac.

He brooded incessantly over his developed but starved passion, over the
thought that Sydney chose to believe him a murderer. At first, when he
was trying day after day to see her, he clung to his love for her; but
when he found her obdurate, set upon wronging him in her thought, his
passion, verging towards despair, changed, and was coloured with hatred.
By degrees he came to dwell more upon the injury done to him by her
suspicion than upon his love of her, and then it was that a certain
wildness crept into his manner, and alarmed or puzzled those who
consulted him.

That his career was going to the dogs Fane understood, but he did not
care. The vision of Sydney was always before him. He was for ever
plotting and planning to be with her alone--against her will or not, it
was nothing to him. And when he was alone with her, what then?

He would know how to act.

It was just in the dawn of the spring season over London that further
inaction became insupportable to him. One evening, after a day of
listless inactivity spent in waiting for the patients who no longer came
in crowds to his door, he put on his hat and walked from Mayfair to
Kensington, vaguely, yet with intention. He looked calm, even absent;
but he was a desperate man. All fear of what the world thinks or says,
all consideration of outward circumstances and their relation to worldly
happiness, had died within him. He was entirely abstracted and
self-centred.

He reached the broad thoroughfare of Ilbury Road, with its line of
artistic red houses, detached and standing in their gardens. The
darkness was falling as he turned into it and began to