I walked back to my rooms.  I felt rather tired, and had a queer feeling of having hammered away on something soft and yielding and yet unbreakable, like putty.  I felt sick at having been so hard, and sick too that she was so soft.  Sick of words, and phrases, and facile emotions, and situations, and insincerities, and Potterisms—­and yet with an odd tide of hope surging through the sickness, because of human nature, which is so mixed that natural cowards will sometimes take a steep and hard way where they might take an easy one, and because we all, in the middle of our egotism and vanity and self-seeking, are often sorry for what we have done.  Really sorry, beneath all the cheap penitence which leads nowhere.  So sorry that we sometimes cannot bear it any more, and will break up our own lives to make amends....

And if, at the same time, we watch our sorrow and our amends, and see it as drama and as interesting—­well, after all, it is drama and it is interesting, so why not?  We can’t all be clear and steely unsentimentalists like Katherine Varick.

One has to learn to bear sentimentalism.  In parishes (which are the world) one has to endure it, accept it.  It is part of the general muddle and mess.

6

I got a Daily Haste next morning early, together with the Pink Pictorial, the illustrated Pinkerton daily.  I looked through them quickly.  There was no reference to the Hobart Mystery.  I was relieved.  Clare Potter had kept her word, then—­or anyhow had said enough to clear Gideon (I wasn’t going further than that about her; I had done my utmost to make her do the straight thing in the straight way, and must leave the rest to her), and the Pinkertons were withdrawing.  They would have, later, to withdraw more definitely than by mere abstaining from further accusation (I intended to see to that, if no one else did), but this was a beginning.  It was, no doubt, all that Pinkerton had been able to arrange last night over the telephone.

It would have interested me to have been present at that interview between Clare and her parents.  I should like to have seen Pinkerton provided by his innocent little daughter with the sensation of his life, and Leila Yorke, the author of Falsely Accused forced to realise her own abominable mischief-making; forced also to realise that her messages from the other side had been as lacking in accuracy as, unfortunately, messages from this side, too, so often are.  I hoped the affair Hobart would be a lesson to both Pinkertons.  But, like most of the lessons set before us in this life, I feared it would be a lesson unlearnt.

Anyhow, Pinkerton was prompt and business like in his methods.  His evening paper contained a paragraph to this effect:—­

’DEATH OF MR HOBART

’NOW CONSIDERED ACCIDENTAL

’FOUL PLAY NOT SUSPECTED