write and say you’re not angry with me, and I want you to let me come and see you.  I was awfully hurt at your telling Milly you didn’t want to see me.  Do write me a line, there’s a good chap, and tell me you forgive me.  It’ll ease my conscience.  I thought you wouldn’t mind or you wouldn’t have offered the money.  But I know I oughtn’t to have taken it.  I came home on Monday and Milly wanted to stay a couple of days at Oxford by herself.  She’s going back to London on Wednesday, so by the time you receive this letter you will have seen her and I hope everything will go off all right.  Do write and say you forgive me.  Please write at once. 
          
                                             Yours ever,
          
                                                     Harry.

Philip tore up the letter furiously.  He did not mean to answer it.  He despised Griffiths for his apologies, he had no patience with his prickings of conscience:  one could do a dastardly thing if one chose, but it was contemptible to regret it afterwards.  He thought the letter cowardly and hypocritical.  He was disgusted at its sentimentality.

“It would be very easy if you could do a beastly thing,” he muttered to himself, “and then say you were sorry, and that put it all right again.”

He hoped with all his heart he would have the chance one day to do Griffiths a bad turn.

But at all events he knew that Mildred was in town.  He dressed hurriedly, not waiting to shave, drank a cup of tea, and took a cab to her rooms.  The cab seemed to crawl.  He was painfully anxious to see her, and unconsciously he uttered a prayer to the God he did not believe in to make her receive him kindly.  He only wanted to forget.  With beating heart he rang the bell.  He forgot all his suffering in the passionate desire to enfold her once more in his arms.

“Is Mrs. Miller in?” he asked joyously.

“She’s gone,” the maid answered.

He looked at her blankly.

“She came about an hour ago and took away her things.”

For a moment he did not know what to say.

“Did you give her my letter?  Did she say where she was going?”

Then he understood that Mildred had deceived him again.  She was not coming back to him.  He made an effort to save his face.

“Oh, well, I daresay I shall hear from her.  She may have sent a letter to another address.”

He turned away and went back hopeless to his rooms.  He might have known that she would do this; she had never cared for him, she had made a fool of him from the beginning; she had no pity, she had no kindness, she had no charity.  The only thing was to accept the inevitable.  The pain he was suffering was horrible, he would sooner be dead than endure it; and the thought came to him that it would be better to finish with the whole thing:  he might throw himself in the river or put his neck on a railway line; but