h
all the generous impulses of sensuous humanity, intensely awakened,
intensely sympathetic.

"Tell me, where is your wife?" she asked.

"In America."

"It is hopeless with her?"

"Utterly and irretrievably hopeless."

"It has been for long?"

"For years."

"And for the sake of your principles," she went on, almost angrily,
"your stupid, canonical and dry-as-dust little principles, you've let
your life shrivel up."

"I can't help it," he answered. "What would you have me do? Stand in
the market place and shout my needs?"

She clung to his arm. "You dear thing!" she said. "You're a great
baby!"

They were in the shadow of the entrance to the flats. He suddenly bent
over her; his lips were almost on hers. There was a frightened gleam in
her eyes, but she made no movement of retreat. Suddenly he drew himself
upright.

"That wouldn't help, would it?" he said simply. "Thank you, all the
same, Nora. Good-by!"

On his table, when he entered his rooms that night, lay the letter for
which he had craved. He opened it almost fiercely. The few lines
seemed like a message of hope:

"Don't laugh at me, dear friend, but I am coming to London for a week or
two, to my little house in Charles Street. I don't know exactly when.
You will find time to come and see me?"

Here the mists seem to have fallen upon us like a shroud, and we can't
escape. I galloped many miles this morning, but it was like trying to
find the edge of the world.

Please call on my sister at 17 Mount Street. She likes you and wants to
see more of you.

JANE.

CHAPTER VII

For some weeks after his chief's dinner party, Tallente slackened a
little in his grim devotion to work. A strangely quiescent period of
day-by-day political history enabled him to be absent from his place in
the House for several evenings during the week, and although he spent a
good many hours with Dartrey at Demos House, carefully discussing and
elaborating next season's programme, he still found himself with time to
spare, and with Jane's note buttoned up in his pocket, he deliberately
turned his face towards life in its more genial and human aspect.

He dined one night at the club to which he had belonged for many years,
a club frequented chiefly by distinguished literary men, successful
barristers, and a sprinkling of actors. His arrival created at first
almost a sensation, a slight feeling of constraint even, amongst the
little gathering of men drinking their a