The prince stretched out his hand, but he was too late.

It was twenty minutes past two o'clock when John left Grosvenor Square,
and it was twenty minutes to five when a sleepy hall-porter took him up
in the lift to his rooms on the fourth floor at the Milan. The
intervening space of time was never anything to him but an ugly and
tangled sheaf of memories.

His first overwhelming desire had been simply to escape from that
enervating and perfervid atmosphere, to feel the morning air cool upon
his forehead, to drink in great gulps of the fresh, windy sweetness. He
felt as if poison had been poured into his veins, as if he had tampered
with the unclean things of life.

He found himself, after a few minutes' hurried walking, in Piccadilly.
The shadows that flitted by him, lingering as he approached and offering
their stereotyped greeting, filled him with a new horror. He turned
abruptly down Duke Street and made his way to St. James's Park. From
here he walked slowly eastward. When he reached the Strand, however, the
storm in his soul was still unabated. He turned away from the Milan. The
turmoil of his passions drove him to the thoughts of flight. Half an
hour later he entered St. Pancras Station.

"What time is the next train north to Kendal or Carlisle?" he inquired.

The porter stared at him. John's evening clothes were spattered with
mud, the rain-drops were glistening on his coat and face, his new silk
hat was ruined. It was not only his clothes, however, which attracted
the man's attention. There was the strained look of a fugitive in John's
face, a fugitive flying from some threatened fate.

"The newspaper train at five thirty is the earliest, sir," he said. "I
don't know whether you can get to Kendal by it, but it stops at
Carlisle."

John looked at the clock. There was an hour to wait. He wandered about
the station, gloomy, chill, deserted. The place sickened him, and he
strolled out into the streets again. By chance he left the station by
the same exit as on the day of his arrival in London. He stopped short.

How could he have forgotten, even for a moment? This was not the world
which he had come to discover. This was just some plague-spot upon which
he had stumbled. Through the murky dawn and across the ugly streets he
looked into Louise's drawing-room. She would be there waiting for him on
the morrow!

Louise! The thought of her was like a sweet, purifying stimulant. He
felt the throbbing of his ne