fact I considered that I showed magnanimity in not
reproaching him with his collapse, for the sense of his having thrown up
the game made me feel more than ever how much I at last depended on him.
If Corvick had broken down I should never know; no one would be of any
use if _he_ wasn't. It wasn't a bit true that I had ceased to care for
knowledge; little by little my curiosity had not only begun to ache
again, but had become the familiar torment of my consciousness. There
are doubtless people to whom torments of such an order appear hardly
more natural than the contortions of disease; but I don't know after
all why I should in this connection so much as mention them. For the
few persons, at any rate, abnormal or not, with whom my anecdote is
concerned, literature was a game of skill, and skill meant courage, and
courage meant honour, and honour meant passion, meant life. The stake
on the table was of a different substance, and our roulette was the
revolving mind, but we sat round the green board as intently as the grim
gamblers at Monte Carlo. Gwendolen Erme, for that matter, with her white
face and her fixed eyes, was of the very type of the lean ladies one had
met in the temples of chance. I recognised in Corvick's absence that she
made this analogy vivid. It was extravagant, I admit, the way she lived
for the art of the pen. Her passion visibly preyed upon her, and in her
presence I felt almost tepid. I got hold of "Deep Down" again: it was
a desert in which she had lost herself, but in which too she had dug a
wonderful hole in the sand--a cavity out of which Corvick had still more
remarkably pulled her.

Early in March I had a telegram from her, in consequence of which I
repaired immediately to Chelsea, where the first thing she said to me
was: "He has got it, he has got it!"

She was moved, as I could see, to such depths that she must mean the
great thing. "Vereker's idea?"

"His general intention. George has cabled from Bombay."

She had the missive open there; it was emphatic, but it was brief.
"Eureka. Immense." That was all--he had saved the money of the
signature. I shared her emotion, but I was disappointed. "He doesn't say
what it is."

"How could he--in a telegram? He'll write it."

"But how does he know?"

"Know it's the real thing? Oh, I'm sure when you see it you do know.
_Vera incessu patuit dea!_"

"It's you, Miss Erme, who are a dear for bringing me such news!"--I went
all lengths in my hig