face good-humour, his constant kindness, he
could scarcely be a happy man. In flashes of sudden gratitude, she
would have been glad often to have done something for him, had there
been anything in the world to do. And then she laughed at herself
for such a vain imagination. Had it not been his proper charm all
along that he was a man for whom one could do nothing? precisely,
because he wanted nothing, was so genuinely indifferent to anything
that life could offer? And now all that was at an end; by his own
confession he had finished it, admitting himself, with a frankness
almost brutal, a man like other men, only with passions more sordid,
and a temper more unscrupulous, in that he had ruined this wretched
woman, whose coming there had left a trail of vileness over her own
life.

"Ah, yes, go!" she said, after a while, answering Rainham's
exclamation. "For pity's sake, go!"

Rainham bowed his head, obeyed her; as the door closed behind them
he could hear that she cried softly, and that Lightmark, his silence
at last broken, consoled her with inaudible words.

CHAPTER XXIV

Rainham turned at random out of Grove Road, walking aimlessly, and
very fast, without considering direction. He had passed the girl's
arm through his own as they left the house; and in a sort of
stupefied obedience she had submitted. To her, too, one way was the
same as another, as dreary and as vain. With Rainham, indeed, after
the tension of the last few minutes, into which he had crowded such
a wealth of suffering and of illumination, a curious stupor had
succeeded. For the moment he neither thought nor suffered: simply,
it was good to be out there, in the darkness--the darkness of
London--after that immense plunge, which was still too near him,
that he should attempt to appreciate it in all its relations.
By-and-by would be the season of reckoning, the just and delicate
analysis, by nicely critical nature, of all that he had deliberately
lost, when he might run desperately before the whips of his own
thought; now he felt only the lethargy which succeeds strenuous
action, that has been, in a measure, victorious; the physical
well-being of walking rapidly, vaguely, through the comfortable
shadows, allowing the cold rain to pelt refreshingly upon his face
and aching temples. And it was not until they had gone so through
several streets, whose names were a blank to him, that Rainham
bethought him, with a touch of self-reproach, of his comp