phant, she bright and gay and
happy.

"O Lord, help me! Help me, O Lord!"

"And now, dragging along the road, in his mind's eye he saw her again as
the victim of this man, his plaything, his pastime to takeup or leave--no
better than any of the women about her, and where they were going she
would go also. Some day he would find her where he had found
others--outcast, deserted, forlorn, lost; down in the trough of life, a
thing of loathing and contempt!

"O Lord, help her! Help her, O Lord!"

There were few passengers by the train going back to London, nearly all
traffic at this hour being the other way, and there was no one else in
the compartment he occupied. He threw himself down in a corner, consumed
with indignation and a strange sense of dishonour. Again he saw her
bright eyes, her red lips--the glow of her whole radiant face and a
paroxysm of jealousy tore his heart to pieces. Glory was his. Though a
bottomless abyss was yawning between them, her soul belonged to him, and
a great upheaval of hatred for the man who possessed her body surged up
to his throat. Against all this his pride as well as his religion
rebelled. He crushed it down, and tried to turn his mind to another
current of ideas. How could he save her? If she should go down to
perdition, his remorse would be worse to bear than flames of fire and
brimstone. The more unworthy she was, the more reason he should strive to
rescue her soul from the pangs of eternal torment.

The rattling of the carriage broke in upon these visions, and he got up
and paced to and fro like a bear in a cage. And, like a bear with its
slow, strong grip, he seemed to be holding her in his wrath and saying:
"You shall not destroy yourself; you shall not, you shall not, for I, I,
I forbid it!" Then he sank back in his seat, exhausted by the conflict
which made his soul a battlefield of spiritual and sensual passions.
Every limb shook and quivered. He began to be afraid of himself, and he
felt an impulse to fly away somewhere. When he alighted at Victoria his
teeth were chattering, although the atmosphere was stifling and the sky
was now heavy with black and lowering clouds.

To avoid the eyes of the people who usually followed him in the streets,
he cut through a narrow thoroughfare and went back to Brown's Square by
way of the park. But the park was like a vast camp. Thousands of people
seemed to cover the grass as far as the eye could reach, and droves of
workmen, followed