“Now I must go,” he said.  “Lizzie is waiting for me.  I’ll see you to-morrow,” he cried, and drove away.

“Just fancy having to look after her, having to attend to her wants, having to leave a friend and return home to dine with her in a small room!  How devilish pleasant it is to be free!—­to say, ’Where shall I dine?’ and to be able to answer, ‘Anywhere.’  But it is too early to dine, and too late to play whist.  Damn it!  I don’t know what to do with myself.”

Mike watched the elegantly-dressed men who passed hurriedly to their clubs, or drove west to dinner parties.  Red clouds and dark clouds collected and rolled overhead, and in a chill wintry breeze the leaves of the tall trees shivered, fell, and were blown along the pavement with sharp harsh sound.  London shrouded like a widow in long crape.

“What is there to do?  Five o’clock!  After that lunch I cannot dine before eight—­three hours!  Whom shall I go and see?”

A vision of women passed through his mind, but he turned from them all, and he said—­

“I will go and see her.”

He had met Miss Dudley in Brighton, in a house where he had been asked to tea.  She was a small, elderly spinster with sharp features and gray curls.  She had expected him to address to her a few commonplace remarks for politeness’ sake, and then to leave her for some attractive girl.  But he had showed no wish to leave her, and when they met again he walked by her bath-chair the entire length of the Cliff.  Miss Dudley was a cripple.  She had fallen from some rocks when a child playing on the beach, and had injured herself irremediably.  She lived with her maid in a small lodging, and being often confined to her room for days, nearly every visitor was welcome.  Mike liked this pallid and forgotten little woman.  He found in her a strange sweetness—­a wistfulness.  There was poetry in her loneliness and her ruined health.  Strength, health, and beauty had been crushed by a chance fall.  But the accident had not affected the mind, unless perhaps it had raised it into more intense sympathy with life.  And in all his various passions and neglected correspondence he never forgot for long to answer her letters, nor did he allow a month to pass without seeing her.  And now he bought for her a great packet of roses and a novel; and with some misgivings he chose Zola’s Page d’Amour.

“I think this is all right.  She’ll be delighted with it, if she’ll read it.”

She would have read anything he gave, and seen no harm since it came from him.  The ailing caged bird cannot but delight in the thrilling of the wild bird that comes to it with the freedom of the sky and fields in its wings and song.  She listened to all his stories, even to his stories of pigeon-shooting.  She knew not how to reproach him.  Her eyes fixed upon him, her gentle hand laid on the rail of her chair, she listened while he told her of the friends he had made, and his life in the country; its seascape and downlands, the furze where he had shot the rabbits, the lane where he had jumped the gate.  Her pleasures had passed in thought—­his in action; the world was for him—­this room for her.