Future still to be faced.... Something
within him seemed to writhe. He took his lower lip between his thumb and
forefinger and squeezed it hard.

That he had hoped for some token, some word--forwarded through Mr.
Narkom--he did not quite realise until he got back to Clarges Street and
found that there was none.

Followed a sense of despair, a moment of deep dejection, that passed in
turn and gave place to a feeling of personal injury, of savage
resentment, and of the ferocity which comes when the half-tamed wolf
wakes to the realisation that here is nothing before it evermore, but
the bars of the cage and the goad of the keeper; and that far and away
in the world there are still the free woods, the naked body of Nature,
and the savage company of its kind.

Under the stress of that gust of passion, he sent Dollops flying from
the room. He wrenched open the drawer of his writing-table, and scooped
up in his hands some trifles of faded ribbon and trinkets of
gold--things that he treasured, none knew why or for what--and holding
them thus, looked down on them and laughed, bitterly and savagely, as
though a devil were within him.

"Me! She scorns me!" he said, and laughed again, and flung them all
back and shut the drawer upon them. And presently he knew that he held
her all the higher because she did scorn him; because her life was such
that she _could_ scorn him; and the bitterness dropped out of him, his
eyes softened, and though he still laughed, it was for an utterly
different reason, and in a wholly different way.

Some pots of tulips and mignonette stood on the ledge of his window. He
walked over to see that they were watered before he went to bed. And
between the time when he got down on his knees to fish out his
bath-slippers from beneath the bed-stead and the creak of the springs
when he lay down for the night, he was so long and so still that one
might have believed he was doing something else.

He slept long, and rose in the morning soothed and subdued in
spirit--better and brighter in every way; for now no affair, for The
Yard hampered his movements and claimed his time. He was free; he was
back in the Town--beautiful because it contained her--and he might hark
back to the old trick of watching and following and being close to her
without her knowledge.

It was a vain hope that, however. For, although he dressed and went out
and haunted the neighbourhood of Sir Horace Wyvern's house for hours on
end, he