Of my wanderings after I left the Museum on that black and dismal dies irae, I have but a dim recollection.  But I must have travelled a quite considerable distance, since it wanted an hour or two to the time for returning to the surgery, and I spent the interval walking swiftly through streets and squares, unmindful of the happenings around, intent only on my present misfortune, and driven by a natural impulse to seek relief in bodily exertion.  For mental distress sets up, as it were, a sort of induced current of physical unrest; a beneficent arrangement, by which a dangerous excess of emotional excitement may be transformed into motor energy, and so safely got rid of.  The motor apparatus acts as a safety-valve to the psychical; and if the engine races for a while, with the onset of bodily fatigue the emotional pressure-gauge returns to a normal reading.

And so it was with me.  At first I was conscious of nothing but a sense of utter bereavement, of the shipwreck of all my hopes.  But, by degrees, as I threaded my way among the moving crowds, I came to a better and more worthy frame of mind.  After all, I had lost nothing that I had ever had.  Ruth was still all that she had ever been to me—­perhaps even more; and if that had been a rich endowment yesterday, why not to-day also?  And how unfair it would be to her if I should mope and grieve over a disappointment that was no fault of hers and for which there was no remedy!  Thus I reasoned with myself, and to such purpose that, by the time I reached Fetter Lane, my dejection had come to quite manageable proportions and I had formed the resolution to get back to the status quo ante bellum as soon as possible.

About eight o’clock, as I was sitting alone in the consulting-room, gloomily persuading myself that I was now quite resigned to the inevitable, Adolphus brought me a registered packet, at the handwriting on which my heart gave such a bound that I had much ado to sign the receipt.  As soon as Adolphus had retired (with undissembled contempt of the shaky signature) I tore open the packet, and as I drew out a letter a tiny box dropped on the table.

The letter was all too short, and I devoured it over and over again with the eagerness of a condemned man reading a reprieve:—­

“My Dear Paul,

“Forgive me for leaving you so abruptly this afternoon, and leaving you so unhappy, too.  I am more sane and reasonable now, and so send you greeting and beg you not to grieve for that which can never be.  It is quite impossible, dear friend, and I entreat you, as you care for me, never to speak of it again; never again to make me feel that I can give so little when you have given so much.  And do not try to see me for a little while.  I shall miss your visits, and so will my father, who is very fond of you; but it is better that we should not meet, until we can take up the old relations—­if that can ever be.