“I’m a precious raw hand,” he confessed to himself with a shake of the head as he stood there smoking.  “And it can’t last—­nothing does.”

Presently he laid down his cigarette a moment on the edge of the balcony, and, coming back into the room, opened a drawer, searched a little, and finally took out a letter.  He stooped over the lamp to read it.  It was the letter which Marcella Boyce had written him some two or three days after the breach of her engagement.  That fact was barely mentioned at the beginning of it, without explanation or comment of any kind.  Then the letter continued: 

“I have never yet thanked you as I ought for all that you have done and attempted through these many weeks.  But for them it must have been plain to us both that we could never rightly meet again.  I am very destitute just now—­and I cling to self-respect as though it were the only thing left me.  But that scene in the past, which put us both wrong with honour and conscience, has surely been wiped out—­thought—­suffered away.  I feel that I dare now say to you, as I would to any other co-worker and co-thinker—­if in the future you ever want my work, if you can set me, with others, to any task that wants doing and that I could do—­ask me, and I am not likely to refuse.

“But for the present I am going quite away into another world.  I have been more ill than I have ever been in my life this last few days, and they are all, even my father, ready to agree with me that I must go.  As soon as I am a little stronger I am to have a year’s training at a London hospital, and then I shall probably live for a while in town and nurse.  This scheme occurred to me as I came back with the wife from seeing Hurd the day before the execution.  I knew then that all was over for me at Mellor.

“As for the wretched break-down of everything—­of all my schemes and friendships here—­I had better not speak of it.  I feel that I have given these village-folk, whom I had promised to help, one more reason to despair of life.  It is not pleasant to carry such a thought away with one.  But if the tool breaks and blunts, how can the task be done?  It can be of no use till it has been re-set.

“I should like to know how your plans prosper.  But I shall see your paper and follow what goes on in Parliament.  For the present I want neither to write nor get letters.  They tell me that as a probationer I shall spend my time at first in washing glasses, and polishing bath-taps, on which my mind rests!

“If you come across my friends of whom I have spoken to you—­Louis, Anthony, and Edith Craven—­and could make any use of Louis for the Labour Clarion, I should be grateful.  I hear they have had bad times of late, and Louis has engaged himself, and wants to be married.  You remember I told you how we worked at the South Kensington classes together, and how they made me a Venturist?

  “Yours very truly,