During the next two years Strange’s life ebbed sullenly away.  The approach of death brought no closer intimacy between uncle and nephew, since indeed the former held it almost as a grievance against David that he should die before he could witness the issue of his experiment.  Consequently the younger man kept his secret to himself, and embraced it the more closely for his secrecy, fostering it through the dreary night watches, until the image of Kate Alden became a Star-in-the-East to him, beckoning towards London.  When the end came, David found himself the possessor of a moderate fortune; and with the humiliating knowledge that this legacy awoke his first feeling of gratitude towards his uncle, he locked the door of the chalet, and so landed at Charing Cross one wet November evening.  Meanwhile the locket had never come.

* * * * *

After Hilton had left, Mrs. Branscome’s forced indifference gave way.  As she crouched beside the fire, numbed by pain beyond the power of thought, she could conjure up but one memory—­the morning of their first meeting.  She recollected that the sun had just risen over the shoulder of the Shreckhorn, and how it had seemed to her young fancy that David had come to her straight from the heart of it.  The sound of her husband’s step in the hall brought her with a shock to facts.  “He must go back,” she muttered, “he must go back.”

David, however, harboured no such design.  One phrase of hers had struck root in his thoughts.  “I had to marry,” she had said, and certain failings in her voice warned him that this, whatever it meant, was in her eyes the truth.  It had given the lie direct to the flippancy which she had assumed, and David determined to remain until he had fathomed its innermost meaning.  A fear, indeed, lest the one single faith he felt as real should crumble to ashes made his resolve almost an instinct of self-preservation.  The idea of accepting the situation never occurred to him, his training having effectually prevented any growth of respect for the status quo as such.  Nor did he realise at this time that his determination might perhaps prove unfair to Mrs. Branscome.  A certain habit of abstraction, nurtured in him by the spirit of inquiry which he had imbibed from his books, had become so intuitive as to penetrate even into his passion.  From the first he had been accustomed to watch his increasing intimacy with Kate Alden from the standpoint of a third person, analysing her actions and feelings no less than his own.  And now this tendency gave the crowning impetus to a resolve which sprang originally from his necessity to find sure foothold somewhere amid the wreckage of his hopes.