S NEW LIFE

Burton spent the rest of the day in most delightful fashion. He took
the Tube to South Kensington Museum, where he devoted himself for
several hours to the ecstatic appreciation of a small section of its
treasures. He lunched off some fruit and tea and bread and butter out
in the gardens, wandering about afterwards among the flower-beds and
paying especial and delighted attention to the lilac trees beyond the
Memorial. Towards evening he grew depressed. The memory of Ellen, of
little Alfred, and his gingerbread villa, became almost like a nightmare
to him. And then the light came! His great resolution was formed.
With beating heart he turned to a stationer's shop, bought a sheet of
paper and an envelope, borrowed a pen and wrote:

My DEAR ELLEN,

I am not coming home for a short time. As you remarked, there is
something the matter with me. I don't know what it is. Perhaps in a
few days I shall find out. I shall send your money as usual on
Saturday, and hope that you and the boy will continue well.

From your husband,

ALFRED BURTON.

Burton sighed a long sigh of intense relief as he folded up and
addressed this epistle. Then he bought four stamps and sent it home.
He was a free man. He had three pounds fifteen in his pocket, a trifle
of money in the savings-bank, no situation, and a wife and son to
support. The position was serious enough, yet never for a moment could
he regard it without a new elasticity of spirit and a certain reckless
optimism, the source of which he did not in the least understand. He
was to learn before long, however, that moods and their resulting effect
upon the spirit were part of the penalty which he must pay for the
greater variety of his new life.

He took a tiny bedroom somewhere Westminster way--a room in a large,
solemn-looking house, decayed and shabby, but still showing traces of
its former splendor. That night he saw an Ibsen play from the front row
of a deserted gallery, and afterwards, in melancholy mood, he walked
homeward along the Embankment by the moonlight. For the first time in
life he had come face to face with a condition of which he had had no
previous experience--the condition of intellectual pessimism. He was
depressed because in this new and more spontaneous world, so full of
undreamed-of beauties, so exquisitely stimulating to his new powers of
appreciation, he had found something which he did not understand. Truth
for the first time had seemed unpl