Her mute sympathy and her deep distress touched him, while, at the same time, they seemed to quench the last spark of hope in him.  Had he counted upon hearing something from her whenever he should break silence which would lighten the veil over the future?  It must have been so, otherwise why this sense of fresh disaster?

‘Dear Marie,’ he said to her, kissing her brow as she stood beside him, ’you must be as good to me as you can.  I shall probably be a good deal out of London for the present, and my books are a wonderful help.  After all, life is not all summed up in one desire, however strong.  Other things are real to me—­I am thankful to say.  I shall live it down.’

‘But why despair so soon?’ she cried, rebelling against this heavy acquiescence of his and her own sense of hopelessness.  ’You are a man any woman might love.  Why should she not pass from the mere friendly intellectual relation to another?  Don’t go away from London.  Stay and see as much of her as you can.’

Kendal shook his head.  ‘I used to dream,’ he said huskily, ’of a time when failure should have come, when she would want some one to step in and shield her.  Sometimes I thought of her protected in my arms against the world.  But now!’

She felt the truth of his unspoken argument—­of all that his tone implied.  In the minds of both the same image gathered shape and distinctness.  Isabel Bretherton in the halo of her great success, in all the intensity of her new life, seemed to her and to him to stand afar off, divided by an impassable gulf from this simple, human craving, which was crying to her, unheard and hopeless, across the darkness.

CHAPTER VIII

A month after the first performance of Elvira Kendal returned to town on a frosty December afternoon from the Surrey lodgings on which he had now established a permanent hold.  He mounted to his room, found his letters lying ready for him, and on the top of them a telegram, which, as his man-servant informed him, had arrived about an hour before.  He took it up carelessly, opened it, and bent over it with a start of anxiety.  It was from his brother-in-law. ’Marie is very ill.  Doctors much alarmed.  Can you come to-night?’ He put it down in stupefaction.  Marie ill! the doctors alarmed!  Good heavens! could he catch that evening train?  He looked at his watch, decided that there was time, and plunged, with his servant’s help, into all the necessary preparations.  An hour and a half later he was speeding along through the clear cold moonlight to Dover, realising for the first time, as he leant back alone in his compartment, the full meaning of the news which had hurried him off.  All his tender affection for his sister, and all his stifling sense of something unlucky and untoward in his own life, which had been so strong in him during the past two months, combined to rouse in him the blackest fears, the most hopeless despondency.  Marie dead,—­what would the world hold for him!  Books, thought, ideas—­were they enough?  Could a man live by them if all else were gone?  For the first time Kendal felt a doubt which seemed to shake his nature to its depths.