ment he felt that this was a delusive
solace. Pity for a man because he had lost money does not incline to
warmer emotion. The hope was sheer feebleness of spirit. He spurned it;
he desired no one's compassion.

How would Irene regard the fact of his illegitimacy? Not, assuredly,
from Mrs. Otway's point of view; she was a century ahead of that.
Possibly she was capable of dismissing it as indifferent. But he could
not be certain of her freedom from social prejudice. He remembered the
singular shock with which he himself had first learnt what he was; a
state of mind quite irrational, but only to be dismissed with an effort
of the trained intelligence. Irene would undergo the same experience,
and it might affect her thought of him for ever.

Not for one instant did he visit these troubles upon the dead man. His
loyalty to his father was absolute; no thought, or half-thought, looked
towards accusation.

He arrived at his hotel in London late at night, drank a glass of
spirits and went to bed. The sleep he hoped for came immediately, but
lasted only a couple of hours. Suddenly he was wide awake, and a horror
of great darkness enveloped him. What he now suffered he had known
before, but with less intensity. He stared forward into the coming
years, and saw nothing that his soul desired. A life of solitude, of
bitter frustration. Were it Irene, were it another, the woman for whom
he longed would never become his. He had not the power of inspiring
love. The mere flesh would constrain him to marriage, a sordid union, a
desecration of his ideal, his worship; and in the latter days he would
look back upon a futile life. What is life without love? And to him
love meant communion with the noblest. Nature had kindled in him this
fiery ambition only for his woe.

All the passion of the great hungry world seemed concentrated in his
sole being. Images of maddening beauty glowed upon him out of the
darkness, glowed and gleamed by he knew not what creative mandate;
faces, forms, such as may visit the delirium of a supreme artist. Of
him they knew not; they were worlds away, though his own brain bodied
them forth. He smothered cries of agony; he flung himself upon his
face, and lay as one dead.

For the men capable of passionate love (and they are few) to miss love
is to miss everything. Life has but the mockery of consolation for that
one gift denied. The heart may be dulled by time; it is not comforted.
Illusion if it be, it is tha