Stafford pursued his way through the woods.  Arriving at the lodge gates, he stopped abruptly, remembering his promise to Eugene.  He saw a little fellow playing about, and called to him.

“Do you know Mr. Lane, my boy?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” said the child.

“Then I’ll give you something to take to him.”

He took a card out of his pocket and wrote on it:  “You were right.  I am going to London”; and giving it, with a sixpence, to his messenger, resumed his journey to the station.

He was stunned.  It cannot be denied that he had been blindly hopeful, blindly confident.  He had persuaded himself that his love for Claudia could be nothing but the outcome of a natural bond between them that must produce a like feeling in her.  He had attributed to her the depth and intensity of emotion that he found in himself.  He had seen in her not merely a girl of more than common quickness, and perhaps more than common capacity, but a great nature ready to respond to a great passion in another.  She had much to give to the man she loved; but Stafford asked even more than was hers to bestow.  He had deceived himself, and the delusion was still upon him.  He was conscious only of an utter, hopeless void.  He had removed all to make room for Claudia, and Claudia refused to fill the vacant place.  With all the will in the world she could not have filled it; but no such thought as this came to console Stafford.  He saw his joy, but was forbidden to reach out his hand and pluck it.  His life lay in the hollow of her hand, to grant or withhold, and she had closed her grasp upon it.

He did not rest until he reached his hotel, for he felt a longing to be able to sit down quietly and think it all over.  He fancied that when he reached his own little room, the cloud that now seemed to hang over all his faculties would disperse, and he would see some plain road before him.  In this he was not altogether disappointed, for it did become clear to him, as he sat in his chair, that the question he had to solve was whether he could now find any motive strong enough to keep him in life.  He realized that Claudia’s action must be accepted as a final destruction of his short dream of happiness.  He felt that he could not go back to his old life, much less to his old attitude of mind, as if nothing had happened—­as if he were an unchanged man, save for one sorrowful memory.  The transformation had been too thorough for that.  He had almost hoped that he would find himself the subject of some sudden revulsion of feeling, some uncontrollable fit of remorse, which would restore him, beaten and bruised, to his old refuge; but had his hope been realized, his sense of relief would, he knew, have been mingled with a measure of contempt for a mind so completely a prey to transient emotions.  His nature was not of that sort, and he could not by a spasm of penitence nullify the events of the last few months.  He must accept himself as altered by what he had gone through.  Was there, then, any life left for the man he was now?