piration that he might not see her again; for it seemed to him that he
could never look upon the face of Andrew Westwood's daughter without a
pang.

He decided to catch the seven o'clock train to London.

"You'll be late for your engagement, I am afraid," Mrs. Rumbold said to
him; thinking of his excuse for running away.

He only smiled and nodded as he walked off, by way of reply. His dinner
in town, he knew well enough, would be eaten in solitude at his club. He
had no other engagement; but he would have invented half a hundred
excuses sooner than stay an hour longer than was necessary under General
Vane's hospitable roof.

He dined silently and expeditiously at his club, and then made his way
through the lighted streets to his lodgings in Bloomsbury. A barrister
by profession, he had found his real vocation in literature, and he
liked to live within easy reach of libraries and newspaper offices. He
had been making a fair income lately, and his earnings were very
acceptable to him, for he was not a man of particularly economical
habits. He had about a hundred a year of his own, and Miss Vane allowed
him another hundred--all else had to be won by the work of his own
hands. And yet, as he passed up the staircase to his own rooms, he was
wondering whether he could not manage to dispense with Miss Vane's
hundred a year.

He had let himself in with his latch-key, and the room which he entered
was lighted only by the lamps in the street. He had not been expected so
early, and his landlady had forgotten to bring the lamp which he was in
the habit of using. He struck a match and lit the gas, pulled down the
blinds, and threw himself with a heavy sigh into the great leathern
arm-chair that stood before his writing-table.

He felt mortally tired. The events of the day had been such as would
have tried a strong man's nerve, and Hubert Lepel was at this time out
of sorts, physically as well as mentally. He had seldom gone through
such hours of keen torture as he had borne that day; and his face--pale,
worn, miserable--seemed to have lost all its youth as he lay back in the
great arm-chair and thought of the past.

He rose at last with an impatient word.

"It is madness to brood over what cannot be undone," he said to himself.
"I must 'dree my own weird' without a word to any living soul. Florence
has my secret, and I have hers; to her I am bound by a tie that nothing
on earth can break. And I can have no other ties. I am