came from Ludlow Manor, near Ledbury.
The name had a slightly familiar sound, though I could not fix it in
my mind. Then he began to talk about a duty on hops, about Californian
hops, about Los Angeles, where he had been. He fencing for a topic with
which he might gain my affection.

And then, quite suddenly, in the bright light of the street, I saw
Florence running. It was like that--I saw Florence running with a face
whiter than paper and her hand on the black stuff over her heart. I tell
you, my own heart stood still; I tell you I could not move. She rushed
in at the swing doors. She looked round that place of rush chairs, cane
tables and newspapers. She saw me and opened her lips. She saw the
man who was talking to me. She stuck her hands over her face as if she
wished to push her eyes out. And she was not there any more.

I could not move; I could not stir a finger. And then that man said:

"By Jove: Florry Hurlbird." He turned upon me with an oily and uneasy
sound meant for a laugh. He was really going to ingratiate himself with
me. "Do you know who that is?" he asked. "The last time I saw that girl
she was coming out of the bedroom of a young man called Jimmy at five
o'clock in the morning. In my house at Ledbury. You saw her recognize
me." He was standing on his feet, looking down at me. I don't know what
I looked like. At any rate, he gave a sort of gurgle and then stuttered:

"Oh, I say...." Those were the last words I ever heard of Mr Bagshawe's.
A long time afterwards I pulled myself out of the lounge and went up to
Florence's room. She had not locked the door--for the first time of
our married life. She was lying, quite respectably arranged, unlike
Mrs Maidan, on her bed. She had a little phial that rightly should have
contained nitrate of amyl, in her right hand. That was on the 4th of
August, 1913.

PART III

I

THE odd thing is that what sticks out in my recollection of the rest of
that evening was Leonora's saying:

"Of course you might marry her," and, when I asked whom, she answered:

"The girl."

Now that is to me a very amazing thing--amazing for the light of
possibilities that it casts into the human heart. For I had never had
the slightest conscious idea of marrying the girl; I never had the
slightest idea even of caring for her. I must have talked in an odd way,
as people do who are recovering from an anaesthetic. It is as if one had
a dual personality, the one I being entirely