impatient and
don't despair. Don't think of your grandmother too much. The mere fact
of your not seeing her makes you imagine her as something portentous and
dreadful, and she weighs you down, but she isn't really anything at all.
She can't stop one's energies if one's determined to let them go.
Please, please don't think I'm laughing. I only want to help----"

"I know you do," he answered warmly, "I owe you more than I can say. All
these last weeks you and Christopher have been the two people who've
held the world together for me. But there's more than you know, Miss
Rand. There's----"

He bent towards her. She knew that the confidence was at last to be
hers. It needed her strongest control to prevent the trembling of her
hands. His eyes were alight, his whole body eloquent. At the thought of
what he might be about to tell her the room turned before her.

Voices in the little hall. Then the door opened and in came Mrs. Rand
and Daisy. They had been to the play--_Such_ nonsense. One of these new,
serious plays with long, long conversations--Mrs. Rand wanted tea. Daisy
wanted admiration.

Between Lizzie and Breton the precious cup had fallen, smashed to the
tiniest atoms.

Meanwhile aimless conversation was more than he, in his present mood,
could endure.

He made some excuse and, scarcely knowing what he did, found his hat and
coat and went out into the square.

III

There had come to him one of those agonies of loneliness that no
argument, no reasoning can destroy.

The absence of any letter from Rachel seemed to show that she had
abandoned him. In all this vast thickly peopled world there was now no
one to whom his presence or absence, his fortunes or disasters mattered.
The snowstorm gathered him into its folds; the snow fell against his
mouth, his eyes, and before him, behind him, around him there was a
world deserted of man, houses blind and without life.

The snow might fall now to the end of time. It would creep up and up,
falling from the heavens, rising from the earth, swallowing all
creation--the end of the world.

He pressed into the park and there under the trees stretching like
gallows against the throttling sky temptation to give it all up, to go
under and have done with it all, leapt, hot and fierce, upon him. Mrs.
Pont and the others were waiting for him. They would be good to him. The
Upper World would not hear nor see nor think of his disasters, and
slowly, with the others, life would