phia--a habit to
which he had only lately taken--he felt unusually fit, and his brain was
unusually alert. At the same time he had had a disagreeable interview
with a doctor that morning who had been insisting on Sanatorium treatment
if the remaining lung was to be preserved and his life prolonged. He did
not want to prolong his life, but only to avoid the beastliness of pain.
It seemed to him that morphia--good stuff!--was going to do that for him.
Why hadn't he begun it before? But his brain was queer--he was conscious
of that. He had asked the doctor about some curious mental symptoms. The
reply was that phthisis was often accompanied by them.

Obsession--fixed ideas--in the medical sense: half of him,
psychologically, was quite conscious that the other half was under their
influence. The sound self was observing the unsound self, but apparently
with no power over it. Otherwise how was it that he was here again,
hiding like a wild beast in a lair, less than a mile from Great End Farm,
and Rachel Henderson?

He had found his way to London in the small hours of the day following
his scene with Rachel, intending to keep his promise, and let his former
wife alone. The cashing of Rachel's cheque had given him and Anita some
agreeable moments; though Anita was growing disturbed that he would not
tell her where the money came from. They had found fresh lodgings in a
really respectable Bloomsbury street; they had both bought clothes, and
little Netta had been rigged out. Delane had magnificently compounded
with his most pressing creditors, and had taken Anita to a theatre. But
he had been discontented with her appearance there. She had really lost
all her good looks. If it hadn't been for the kid--

And now, after this interval, his obsession had swooped upon him again.
It was an obsession of hate--which simply could not endure, when it came
to the point, that Rachel Henderson should vanish unscathed into the
future of a happy marriage, while he remained the doomed failure and
outcast he knew himself to be. Rachel's implied confession rankled in him
like a burn. _Tanner!_--that wretched weakling, with his miserable daubs
that nobody wanted to buy. So Rachel had gone to him, as soon as she had
driven her husband away, no doubt to complain of her ill-treatment, to
air her woes. The fellow had philandered round her some time, and had
shown an insolent and interfering temper once or twice towards himself.
Yes!--he could imagin