learning. She saw him as he was--small, false, a poor creature, who
having failed on the mountains, had been content to crawl through the
marshes. He seemed in those few moments to be stripped bare to her. He
was not even a gentleman. He wore his manners as he wore his clothes.
He belonged to her world no more than the servant who had announced
him. She clenched her fingers. It was ignoble that her heart should be
beating, that the breath should come sobbing through her parted lips.
He was a creature to be despised!

She raised her head and told him so, fighting all the while with
something greater and stronger which seemed to be tearing at her heart
strings.

"If that is what you came here to say," she said, "please go."

He rose at once. She saw the anxious light with which his eyes had
been filled, fade away. He turned almost humbly toward the door.

"You are quite right," he said. "I should not have come. I do not
often have impulses. It is a mistake to listen to them. Yet I came
because it was the one honest desire which I have had since I looked
down into the water and turned away."

He walked toward the door. She stood with her finger pressing the
bell. He seemed somehow to have lost what little presence he had ever
possessed. His head was bowed; he walked as one feeling for his way in
the dark. Never once did he look round. As he stood before the door,
her lips were suddenly parted. A great wave of pity rose up from
amongst those other things in her heart. She would have called out to
him, but her butler was already there. The door had been opened.

She clenched her teeth, and resumed her place upon the sofa. She heard
the front door closed, and she found herself watching him through the
blind. She saw him cross the road very much as he had crossed the
room--unseeing, stricken. She watched him until he crossed the corner
of the square. Her eyes were misty with tears!

CHAPTER XXIX

THE COURAGE OF DESPERATION

Captain Vandermere had a friend from the country, and was giving him
supper at the _Savoy_. He was also pointing out the different people
who were worthy of note.

"That," he said, pointing to an adjoining table, "is really one of the
most interesting men in London."

"He looks like an actor," his friend remarked.

"So he may be," Vandermere answered grimly, "but his is not the
Thespian stage. He is a lecturer and writer on occultism, and in his
way, I suppose, he is amazingly cleve