“You can’t expect,” he remarked, “to become famous and remain at the same time unknown.  There is a great and growing weakness on the part of the public to-day for personalities.  I suppose it is the spread of American methods in journalism which is responsible for it.  Some day your chroniclers will help themselves to your past, whether you will or not.”

Douglas rose up with an uneasy laugh.

“It will be an evil day for them,” he said; “perhaps for me.  But at least I will not anticipate it.”

He wandered restlessly from room to room of the club, returning the greetings of his acquaintances with a certain vagueness, lingering nowhere for more than a moment or two.  Finally, he took his hat from the rack and walked out into the street.  Fronting him was the Thames.  He leaned against the iron railing and looked out across the dusty, sun-baked gardens to where the river flowed down between the bridges.  Something of the despair, which had so nearly broken his heart a short while since, seemed again to lay tormenting clutches upon him.  After all, was not a man for ever the slave of his past?  No present success, no future triumphs could ever wholly free him from the memory of that one merciless hour.  As a rule his thoughts recoiled shuddering from even the slightest lingering about it.  To-night there swept in upon him with irresistible force a crowd of vivid memories.  He saw the quaint old village, its grey stone houses dotted about the hillside, the farmhouse which had been his home—­bare, gaunt, everything outside and in typical of the man who ruled there and over the little neighbourhood, a tyrant and a despot.  The misery of those days laid hold of him, He turned away from the railings and walked Strandwards, past the door of his lodgings and round many side streets, grimy and unpretentious.  He walked like a man possessed, but his memories had taken firm hold of him, shadowy but inexorcisable fiends.  It was Cicely now who was walking by his side, and his heart was beating with something of the old stir.  What a change her coming had made in that strange corner of the world.  Cicely, with her dainty figure and bright, sunny smile, wonderfully light-hearted, a gleam of brilliant colour thrown across their grey life.  She loved poetry too, the hills, the sunsets, and those long walks across the purple moorland.  It was a wonderful companionship into which they had drifted.  He was her refuge in a life which she frankly declared to be insupportable.  She was a revelation to him—­the first he had had—­of delicate femininity, full ever of suggestions of that wonderful world beyond, of which at that time he had only dared to dream.  It was she who had kindled his ambitions, who had preached to him silently, but with convincing eloquence, of the glories of freedom, the heritage of his manhood.  And all the while Joan, from apart, was watching them.  No word crossed her lips, yet often on their return from a day’s rambling he caught a look in her