e as though nothing very terrible had happened, after all. I
wrote a few lines to the Duchess that night; but I wrote amidst the
preparations for my departure from England: I crossed the Channel next
morning. Throughout that Sunday afternoon with Braxton at the Keeb
railway station, pacing the desolate platform with him, waiting in
the desolating waiting-room with him, I was numb to regrets, and was
thinking of nothing but the 4.3. On the way to Victoria my brain worked
and my soul wilted. Every incident in my stay at Keeb stood out clear
to me; a dreadful, a hideous pattern. I had done for myself, so far as
THOSE people were concerned. And now that I had sampled THEM, what cared
I for others? "Too low for a hawk, too high for a buzzard." That homely
old saying seemed to sum me up. And suppose I COULD still take pleasure
in the company of my own old upper-middle class, how would that class
regard me now? Gossip percolates. Little by little, I was sure, the
story of my Keeb fiasco would leak down into the drawing-room of Mrs.
Foster-Dugdale. I felt I could never hold up my head in any company
where anything of that story was known. Are you quite sure you never
heard anything?'

I assured Maltby that all I had known was the great bare fact of his
having stayed at Keeb Hall.

'It's curious,' he reflected. 'It's a fine illustration of the loyalty
of those people to one another. I suppose there was a general agreement
for the Duchess' sake that nothing should be said about her queer guest.
But even if I had dared hope to be so efficiently hushed up, I couldn't
have not fled. I wanted to forget. I wanted to leap into some void,
far away from all reminders. I leapt straight from Ryder Street into
Vaule-la-Rochette, a place of which I had once heard that it was
the least frequented seaside-resort in Europe. I leapt leaving no
address--leapt telling my landlord that if a suit-case and a portmanteau
arrived for me he could regard them, them and their contents, as his own
for ever. I daresay the Duchess wrote me a kind little letter, forcing
herself to express a vague hope that I would come again "some other
time." I daresay Lady Rodfitten did NOT write reminding me of my promise
to lunch on Friday and bring "Ariel Returns to Mayfair" with me. I
left that manuscript at Ryder Street; in my bedroom grate; a shuffle of
ashes. Not that I'd yet given up all thought of writing. But I certainly
wasn't going to write now about the two th