d off my clothes and got into bed, feeling almost uncertain on
my feet. My head seemed literally whirling and swimming in pain. When I
awoke the following morning and looked round it was past ten. Dick had
gone. I looked at the couch, it was empty, and a note was stuck by his
pin into the sofa pillow. I sat up in bed, and by leaning forward and
extending my arm I got hold of the pillow, and thence the paper and
read it.

"8 A.M.--You are still asleep and I don't like to wake you, but I want
to be back at my place by nine, so I am departing like the guest of an
Arab. If you have nothing better to do this evening, come and dine with
me. Army and Navy. Seven."

"Very good," I thought; I put the note and the pin on the table beside
me, and got up. The headache was gone, and the head felt none the worse
for it. The sun was streaming in through the blinds now. The gloom, the
apprehensions, the pain of the previous night, had all cleared from the
field together. I dressed and shaved with a steady hand, thinking, in a
sane, easy way, very different from the inflamed, convulsive working of
the brain last night. The work was set afloat in Paris--I should soon
find readers on the asphalt--that quarter of my sky was clear. As for
the sudden darkening squall that had sprung up in the other quarter,
formerly so serene, the quarter over which reigned Lucia's star--it was
only a squall, it would pass. She must be capable of being roused again
to those feelings she had once known. And if I had nothing else, I had,
at least, in my favour the sheer force and intensity of my own
passion--which is, after all, the weapon under which a woman quickest
sinks. I felt that I cared more keenly for Lucia than most men of
eight-and-twenty in the nineteenth century care for the women they
marry. I was conscious of it instinctively; even if the memory of these
last ten barren, empty years that I had lived did not convince me that
a passion for any one object would be greater in myself than in men
whose multiplicity of previous loves must lessen the value of each
succeeding one. My work, which had been Lucia's successful rival, had
protected her from lesser ones.

Nothing, except the possession of this woman, had ever been a synonym
of pleasure with me, and therefore its expectation had a stronger hold
over me than it could have had over a man who was accustomed to
acknowledge and recognise pleasure under a hundred names. I felt the
impetus of this