time; and beside this brilliant vision he saw himself, the quiet man of
letters, with the enthusiasms of youth behind him, the calm of middle-age
before him. What possible link could there be between them?

At last Wallace's letter cleared still further the issues of the
conflict; or rather, it led to Kendal's making a fatalist compact with
himself. He was weary of the struggle, and it seemed to him that he must
somehow or other escape from the grip in which his life was held. He must
somehow deaden this sense, this bitter sense of loss, if it were only by
postponing the last renunciation. He would go back to his work and force
himself not to hate it. It was his only refuge, and he must cling to it
for dear life. And he would not see her again till the night of the first
performance of _Elvira_. She would be in London in a month's time, but he
would take care to be out of reach. He would not meet those glorious eyes
or touch that hand again till the die was cast,--upon the fate of
_Elvira_ he staked his own. The decision brought him a strange kind of
peace, and he went back to his papers and his books like a man who has
escaped from the grasp of some deadly physical ill into a period of
comparative ease and relief.

CHAPTER VII

It was a rainy November night. A soft continuous downpour was soaking the
London streets, without, however, affecting their animation or the
nocturnal brightness of the capital, for the brilliance of the gas-lamps
was flashed back from innumerable patches of water, and every ray of
light seemed to be broken by the rain into a hundred shimmering
reflections. It was the hour when all the society of which an autumnal
London can boast is in the streets, hurrying to its dinner or its
amusements, and when the stream of diners-out, flowing through the
different channels of the west, is met in all the great thoroughfares by
the stream of theatre-goers setting eastward.

The western end of D---- Street was especially crowded, and so was the
entrance to a certain narrow street leading northwards from it, in which
stood the new bare buildings of the _Calliope_. Outside the theatre
itself there was a dense mass of carriages and human beings, only kept in
order by the active vigilance of the police, and wavering to and fro with
kaleidoscopic rapidity. The line of carriages seemed interminable, and,
after those who emerged from them had run the gauntlet of the dripping,
curious, good-tempered multi