ve her into my arms now as I sat there, and the blind
physical system clamoured in agony, Where is she? An hour passed, and
then I got up and laughed. The destructive wave of emotion had risen in
me, rolled through me and gone by. The struggle was over, and I lived
again but to work. I stood on the rug rolling a cigarette, and lighted
it leisurely, trying to recall a respectable calm, and when I had
fairly succeeded I went out and downstairs. I came into the dining-room
and found my father still there, looking through a budget of political
pamphlets that had just come in by the post.

He looked up, and I met his eyes with a laugh.

"I have decided not to look out for a vacancy in the shoeblack line," I
said; "but to go on--up the hill. Is there any claret or water or soda
about--I don't much care what it is?"

"There is claret and soda too--there on the cheffonier. What a pity it
is, Victor, you are so unreasonable! You make yourself look deplorably
ill about every trifle! You are certainly trying to find a short cut
out of the world! Why don't you take things more easily?"

"I am as I am," I muttered. "I'm going out now," I said, when I had
finished the soda.

"I'm going to look Howard up. I have got a new plan of work if he'll
join me in it. I shall see."

My father elevated his shoulders as much as to say, Some new phase of
dementia, I suppose, and I went out.

I took the underground to Baker Street, and thence two minutes' walk
brought me to the house I wanted. Howard was a friend of mine, an
intimate friend, though, strictly speaking, from his character he ought
not to have been.

As a general rule I steer clear of friendships with men who are very
much opposed to me in character; it saves a lot of bother in the end.
However, in this case, although I believed Howard to be a weak,
worthless, untrustworthy individual, I could not help liking him. He
was talented and of a pleasing--at least to me--personality. When I
came into his room he was sitting reading in a long chair by the fire.

"Oh! is that you, Vic? Come in," he said, turning a good-looking
discontented face towards me, not improved just now by the effects of a
severe attack of jaundice.

"How are you?" I said, shaking his saffron-hued hand.

"Pretty beastly. And you?"

"Your remark might serve, I think," I said, taking a chair opposite him.

"Aren't you any better?" and I scanned his face closely.

He was not more than twenty, and had a si