at I am writing these actual
pages, afterwards, at Verona, amplifying the rough notes in
my diary. M. O.

A sudden clattering, nerve-shaking, strident peal at the front-door
bell.

I flew down the stairs. It was news of Carlotta. It was Carlotta herself
brought back to me. My heart swelled with joy as if it would burst. I
knew that as I opened the door Carlotta would fall laughing, weeping,
sobbing into my arms.

I opened the door. It was only a police officer in plain clothes.

"Sir Marcus Ordeyne?"

"Yes."

"We have traced the young lady all right. She left London by the
two-twenty Continental express from Victoria with Mr. Sebastian
Pasquale."

CHAPTER XVIII

November 1st.

Five days ago the blow fell, and I am only now recovering; only now
awakening to the horrible pain of it.

I have gone about like a man in a dream. Blurred visages of men with
far-away voices have saluted me at the club. Innumerable lines of print
which my eyes have scanned have been destitute of meaning. I have forced
myself to the mechanical task of copying piles of rough notes for my
History; I have been able to bring thereto not an atom of intelligence;
popes, princes, painters are a category of disassociated names, less
evocative of ideas than the columns in the Post Office London Directory.
I have stared stupidly into the fire or at the dripping branches of the
trees opposite my windows. I have walked the streets in dull misery. I
have sought solace in the Zoological Gardens.

There is a kindly brown bear who pleads humanly for buns, and her I have
fed into a sort of friendship. I stand vacantly in front of the cage
finding in the beast an odd companionable sympathy. She turns her head
on one side, regards me with melting brown eyes, and squatting on her
haunches thrusts her paws beseechingly through the bars. Just so did
Carlotta beseech and plead. I have bemused myself with gnostic and
metempsychosic speculations. Carlotta as an ordinary human being with
an immortal soul did not exist, and what I had known and loved was but
a simulacrum of female form containing an elemental spirit doomed to
be ever seeking a fresh habitat. It was but the lingering ghost of the
humanised shell of air that was seen at Victoria station. The fateful
spirit, untrammelled by the conventions of men and actuated by destinies
unintelligible to mortal mind, had informed the carcass of this
little brown bear, which looks at me s