him to reflect, a principle was a poor affair if it
merely became a fact. Yet from the hour it did turn to action the action
_had_ to be the particular one in which he was engaged; so that he was
in the absurd position of thinking his conduct wiser for the reason
that it was directly opposed to his intentions.

He had kept away from London ever since Miriam Rooth came over;
resisting curiosity, sympathy, importunate haunting passion, and
considering that his resistance, founded, to be salutary, on a general
scheme of life, was the greatest success he had yet achieved. He was
deeply occupied with plucking up the feeling that attached him to her,
and he had already, by various little ingenuities, loosened some of its
roots. He had suffered her to make her first appearance on any stage
without the comfort of his voice or the applause of his hand; saying to
himself that the man who could do the more could do the less and that
such an act of fortitude was a proof he should keep straight. It was not
exactly keeping straight to run over to London three months later and,
the hour he arrived, scramble off to Balaklava Place; but after all he
pretended only to be human and aimed in behaviour only at the heroic,
never at the monstrous. The highest heroism was obviously three parts
tact. He had not written to his young friend that he was coming to
England and would call upon her at eleven o'clock in the morning,
because it was his secret pride that he had ceased to correspond with
her. Sherringham took his prudence where he could find it, and in doing
so was rather like a drunkard who should flatter himself he had forsworn
liquor since he didn't touch lemonade.

It is a sign of how far he was drawn in different directions at once
that when, on reaching Balaklava Place and alighting at the door of a
small detached villa of the type of the "retreat," he learned that Miss
Rooth had but a quarter of an hour before quitted the spot with her
mother--they had gone to the theatre, to rehearsal, said the maid who
answered the bell he had set tinkling behind a stuccoed garden-wall:
when at the end of his pilgrimage he was greeted by a disappointment he
suddenly found himself relieved and for the moment even saved.
Providence was after all taking care of him and he submitted to
Providence. He would still be watched over doubtless, even should he
follow the two ladies to the theatre, send in his card and obtain
admission to the scene of thei