verlasting bliss. He would gladly have spared a hand or an
eye for a mere chance at the same reward.

Arrived in Boston there was nothing for him to do but to eat an
expensive dinner at a restaurant and go back again. He did not return on
foot. He had had enough of his own thoughts. They led him round and
round in a circle without end. He was ashamed, too, to perceive that
they concerned themselves chiefly, not with his love for Olivia Guion,
but with his enmity to Rupert Ashley. It was the first time in his life
that he was ever possessed by the fury to kill a man. He wouldn't have
been satisfied to be rid of Ashley; he wanted to leap on him, to strike
him, to choke him, to beat him to death. Sitting with his eyes fixed on
the table-cloth, from which the waiter had removed everything but the
finger-bowl and the bill, and allowing the cigar that protruded between
his knuckles to burn uselessly, he had already indulged in these
imaginary exercises, not a little to his relief, before he shook himself
and muttered: "I'm a damned fool."

The repetition of this statement, together with the dull belief that
repetition engenders, braced him at last to paying his bill and taking
the tram-car to Waverton. He had formed a resolution. It was still
early, scarcely later than the hour at which he usually dined. He had a
long evening before him. He would put it to use by packing his
belongings. Then he would disappear. He might go at once to Stoughton,
or he might travel no farther than the rooms he had engaged, and which
he had occupied in former years, on the less attractive slope of Beacon
Hill. It would be all the same. He would be out of the circle of
interests that centered round Olivia Guion, and so free to come back to
his senses.

He got so much elation out of this resolve that from the electric car to
Rodney Temple's house he walked with a swinging stride, whistling
tunelessly beneath his breath. He tried to think he was delivered from
an extraordinary obsession and restored to health and sanity. He planned
to initiate Ashley as the new _charge d'affaires_ without the necessity
on his part of seeing Miss Guion again.

And yet, when he opened the door with his latch-key and saw a note lying
on the table in the hail, his heart bounded as though it meant to stop
beating. It was sheer premonition that made him think the letter was for
him. He stooped and read the address before he had taken off his hat and
while he was stil