d not go to Chislebridge for another six months. Gwendolen asked
him very pressingly on various occasions, but twice he was engaged and
once ill and too depressed and jaded to make the effort. It was the time
of all others when Gwendolen and her ministrations would have been most
acceptable, but he shrank from submitting himself to their influences,
feeling that in his very need he might find too great a compulsion. The
thought of Gwendolen and of her possible place in his life must be
adjourned--adjourned until she was well out of her mourning and he was
able to meet it more impartially.

He saw Gwendolen in London and gave her and her boys tea at his rooms,
the dingily comfortable rooms near Manchester Square from which for many
years he had not had the initiative to move. There was more potency, he
found, in the imaginary Gwendolen than in the real one. The sight of her
brought back vividly the thought of Mrs. Waterlow. Curiously, they
seemed to have spoiled each other. Gwendolen had all the ethical
advantages and even, if it came to that, all the aesthetic ones; yet,
ambiguous as the image of the other had become, its charm challenged
Gwendolen's virtues and Gwendolen's achievements. He even felt that he
could be sure of nothing until he next stayed with Gwendolen, when he
must see Mrs. Waterlow and weigh the possible friendship with her,
tarnished though it were, against the comfortable solutions that
Gwendolen held out to him. Again, curiously, he knew that the two could
not be combined.

Gwendolen, however, was gone away to the south of France when he wrote
to her in November and asked if he might stop a day and night on his way
through Chislebridge to a country week-end. But he had a two-hours'
wait at the station, and he suddenly determined, when he found himself
on the platform, to go and have tea with Mrs. Waterlow.

He drove up to the peaceful street where, above the college wall that
ran along its upper end, a close tracery of branches showed against the
sky, and he found that a welcoming firelight shone in the spacious
windows of the Georgian house. His dismay, therefore, was the more
untempered when the mildly austere maid told him that Mrs. Waterlow was
away. His pause there on the threshold expressed his condition, and the
maid suggested that he might care to come in and see old Mrs. Waterlow.
This, he felt, was indeed better than not to go in at all. So he was led
for a second time into the drawing-r