and understood, because they had mingled their thoughts and trodden the path of misery together.  Removed now from that blaze of passion, smouldering perhaps in him through previous years of discontent, but which leaped into actual and effective life for the first time in those few moments, he realised a certain justice in her point of view, a certain hard logic in the way she had spoken of life and their relations.  There had been so little real affection between them.  So little had passed which might have constituted a greater bond.  It was his passionate outburst of revolt against life, whose drear talons seemed to have fastened themselves into his very soul, which had sent him out with murder in his brain to seek the man who had robbed him of the one thing which stood between him and despair; the pent-up fury of a lifetime which had tingled in his blood and had given him the strength of the navvy in those few minutes by the canal side.

He covered his face with his hands, strode around the room, gazing wildly out over the city, trying to listen to the clanging of the surface cars, the rumble of the overhead railway in the distance, the breaking of the long, ceaseless waves of human feet upon the pavement.  It was useless.  No effort of his will could keep from his brain the haunting memory of those final moments—­the man’s face, handsome and well-satisfied at first, the careless greeting, the sudden change, the surprise, the apprehension, the ghastly fear, the agony!  He heard the low, gurgling shriek of terror; he looked into the eyes with the fear of hell before them!  Then he heard the splash of the black, filthy water.

There was a cry.  It was several seconds before he realised that it had broken from his lips.  He looked around him like a hunted creature.  There was another terror now—­the gloomy court with its ugly, miserable paraphernalia—­the death, uglier still, death in disgrace, a sordid, ghastly thing!  And in his brain, too, there was so much dawning, so many wonderful ideas craving for fulfilment.  These few months had been months of marvellous development.  The power of the writer had seemed to grow, hour by hour.  His brain was full of fancies, exquisite fancies some of them.  It was a new world growing up around him and within him, too beautiful a world to leave.  Yet, in those breathless moments, fear was the dominant sensation.  He felt a coward to his fingertips...

He walked up and down the room feverishly, as a man might pace a prison in the first few moments of captivity.  There was no escape!  If he disappeared again, it would only rivet suspicion the more closely.  There was no place to which he could fly, no shelter save on the other side of the life which he had just begun to love.  His physical condition began to alarm him.  He felt his forehead by accident and found it damp with sweat.  His heart was beating irregularly with a spasmodic vigour which brought pain.  He caught sight of his terror-stricken face in the looking-glass, and the craving to escape from his frenzied solitude overcame all his other resolutions.  He rushed to the telephone, spoke with Phoebe, waited breathlessly whilst she fetched his mistress to the instrument.