his most admirable and adventurous
vein. You can imagine the happy chances that would have guided me to the
hiding-place, the trusty friend who would have come with me and told the
story, the grim siege of the place--all as it were _sotto voce_ for fear
of scandal--the fight with Guy in the little cave, my attempted
assassination, the secret passage. Would to heaven life had those rich
simplicities, and one could meet one's man at the end of a sword! My
siege of Mirk makes a very different story from that.

In the first place I had no trusted friend of so extravagant a
friendship as such aid would demand. I had no one whom it seemed
permissible to tell of our relations. I was not one man against three or
four men in a romantic struggle for a woman. I was one man against
something infinitely greater than that, I was one man against nearly all
men, one man against laws, traditions, instincts, institutions, social
order. Whatever my position had been before, my continuing pursuit of
Mary was open social rebellion. And I was in a state of extreme
uncertainty how far Mary was a willing agent in this abrupt
disappearance. I was disposed to think she had consented far more than
she had done to this astonishing step. Carrying off an unwilling woman
was outside my imaginative range. It was luminously clear in my mind
that so far she had never countenanced the idea of flight with me, and
until she did I was absolutely bound to silence about her. I felt that
until I saw her face to face again, and was sure she wanted me to
release her, that prohibition held. Yet how was I to get at her and hear
what she had to say? Clearly it was possible that she was under
restraint, but I did not know; I was not certain, I could not prove it.
At Guildford station I gathered, after ignominious enquiries, that the
Justins had booked to London. I had two days of nearly frantic
inactivity at home, and then pretended business that took me to London,
for fear that I should break out to my father. I came up revolving a
dozen impossible projects of action in my mind. I had to get into touch
with Mary, at that my mind hung and stopped. All through the twenty-four
hours my nerves jumped at every knock upon my door; this might be the
letter, this might be the telegram, this might be herself escaped and
come to me. The days passed like days upon a painful sick-bed, grey or
foggy London days of an appalling length and emptiness. If I sat at home
my imaginat